The Compression Curve

For most of human history, the relationship between cognitive compression and tool sophistication followed a gentle slope. Writing, mathematical notation, the printing press — each arrived centuries apart, giving societies generations to develop the recoding skills necessary to use them well. A scribe who learned cuneiform spent years building the chunking vocabulary required to operate fluently; his grandchildren inherited not just the technology but the cultural infrastructure supporting the recoding process. Then the curve steepened. The printing press arrived around 1440; its full implications took a century. The telegraph, the 1830s; two decades to restructure commerce. The personal computer, the late 1970s; one decade to restructure knowledge professions. The smartphone, 2007; five years to restructure daily life. Large language models, 2022; two years to restructure software development itself. Each compression arrived faster. Each demanded recoding on a tighter timeline. And each was absorbed because each compressed a layer adjacent to the one the previous compression had handled.