PERSON
Martin Luther
The Augustinian friar whose challenge to the Church's interpretive monopoly became, because of Gutenberg's press, the first information-technology revolution in Western history—a template for what happens when a machine collapses the cost of authoritative knowledge.
Martin Luther is the case study the AI moment did not know it needed. He was not the first to say what he said; John Wycliffe and Jan Hus had said similar things before him, and both had been destroyed. What changed was
the printing press, which made Luther's protest impossible to suppress by the institution's ordinary means. Within weeks of his 1517 posting of the Ninety-Five Theses, his arguments had been translated, printed, and distributed across cities he had never visited; within years he was the first bestselling author in history. The hammer is the wrong icon for Luther. The right one is the press. His doctrine of
sola scriptura—that scripture was the supreme authority and the believer did not need the institution to mediate it—was the demand for disintermediation in the most explosive possible domain, and the structure of that demand maps with uncanny precision onto what AI is doing to every profession whose authority rests on monopolizing