The Printing Press as Cultural Technology

The printing press is the historical precedent at the heart of the cultural technology thesis. Johannes Gutenberg's introduction of movable-type printing in the mid-fifteenth century did not produce a single original insight. It did not think, reason, or generate new knowledge. It made existing knowledge dramatically more accessible, more reproducible, and more widely distributed — and in doing so, it reshaped European society more profoundly than any individual mind ever had. The Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the rise of the public sphere, the emergence of the novel, the democratization of literacy: each of these transformations was enabled not by new thinking but by the new medium through which thinking moved. This is the model, Gopnik argues, for understanding what LLMs are doing to contemporary cognition.