PERSON
Ann Blair
American historian of early modern European intellectual culture (b. 1961), Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard, whose Too Much to Know established that the information-overload experience is a recurring structural condition, not a modern affliction.
Ann Blair (b. 1961) is an American historian whose work on the information-management practices of early modern Europe has become the reference point for contemporary thinking about AI-era abundance. Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard, where she has taught since 1996, Blair was educated at Harvard and Princeton before returning to Harvard's faculty. Her landmark work, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (2010), traces the history of information overload from antiquity through the early modern period. Her concept of infolust, her analysis of commonplace books and florilegia, and her sustained attention to the invisible labor of curation have made her work essential to anyone trying to understand what the AI moment demands.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Blair's scholarly training was classical — Renaissance natural philosophy, the history of the book, early modern intellectual history — and her contribution to the AI discourse arrives as a side effect