CONCEPT
The Cheaper Bible (Kay's Printing Press Analogy)
Alan Kay's observation that every new medium is first used to reproduce the forms of the old medium more efficiently—and that the genuinely new forms a medium makes possible emerge only after generations develop the literacy to imagine them.
The first users of Gutenberg's printing press used it to make cheaper bibles—reproducing existing manuscripts so faithfully that early printed books were nearly indistinguishable from their hand-copied predecessors. This is not a historical curiosity. It is the universal first stage of any new medium's adoption, and it is the stage the AI field is living through now.
Alan Kay returns to the printing press more often than to any other analogy because it is the clearest example of a technology that was profoundly misunderstood at the moment of its arrival—mistaken for a faster version of the old thing when it was in fact a different thing entirely. The genuinely new forms the press made possible—the novel, which requires wide distribution of identical copies; the newspaper; the scientific journal, which requires distribution of verifiable results to peers who can replicate and challenge them; the democratic pamphlet that powered the American and French revolutions—none