Ben Thompson's latest post makes an intriguing point. Not the general point about aggregation theory and AI (although that is also interesting), but the first part:

Before the printing press: (...) The linguistic landscape was extremely diverse: Latin was the language of the church, while larger regions might have a dominant dialect, which itself could differ from local dialects only spoken in a limited geographic area.

The printing press was a direct assault on that last point: because it still cost money to produce a book, it made sense to print books in the most dominant dialect in the region; because books were compelling it behooved people to learn to read that dominant dialect. This, over time, would mean that the dominant dialect would increase its dominance in a virtuous cycle — network effects, in other words.

Books, meanwhile, transmitted culture, building affinity between neighboring city states; it took decades and, in some cases, centuries, but over time Europe settled into a new equilibrium of distinct nation-states, with their own languages. Critical to this reorganization was point one: the printing press meant everyone could have access to the Bible, or read pamphlets challenging the Catholic Church. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses was one such example: printing presses spread the challenge to papal authority far and wide precisely because it was so incendiary — that was good for business.

Ben's basically saying that information technology kicked off a domino effect that changed the entire political fabric of the world. That's huge. I'd always considered information tech to shake up other systems, such as news outlets and the internet, but not countries. I guess it does take longer than one's lifespan for those changes to take place, but still.

Ben's point also reminded me of another similar one I'd read in David Graeber's Debt, where (I'm going to summarize and likely butcher) David posits coinage was the key differentiator in how the Roman empire could sustain such a vast empire for so long. Prior to gold/silver based coins, most economic activity was debt based. David also distinguishes these two systems as hard and soft money, and suggests that economies swing back and forth between the two throughout history. Obviously today we mostly use soft money that is fiat (much to the dismay of gold bugs and bitcoin maxis).

Coinage was a technological innovation back in the day. One can even argue coinage's modern day equivalent is crypto. Tbd whether crypto will trigger a similar structural change in the near future, although my 2c is no because crypto provides the same benefits to fiat based currencies (via stablecoins) as it does for "hard" ones such as bitcoin.

It is interesting to consider technology as a mental model that provides leverage to the primary modes of humanity: information, value and power (my made up classification). As new technologies provide a step function change in any of the above, over the long term it can trigger massive secular waves in how human organize themselves.

We'll see what happens with AI and to which (if not all) of humanity's primary modes it provides the leverage to cause massive changes.

Ben Thompson's latest post makes an intriguing point. Not the general point about aggregation theory and AI (although that is also interesting), but the first part:

Before the printing press: (...) The linguistic landscape was extremely diverse: Latin was the language of the church, while larger regions might have a dominant dialect, which itself could differ from local dialects only spoken in a limited geographic area.

The printing press was a direct assault on that last point: because it still cost money to produce a book, it made sense to print books in the most dominant dialect in the region; because books were compelling it behooved people to learn to read that dominant dialect. This, over time, would mean that the dominant dialect would increase its dominance in a virtuous cycle — network effects, in other words.

Books, meanwhile, transmitted culture, building affinity between neighboring city states; it took decades and, in some cases, centuries, but over time Europe settled into a new equilibrium of distinct nation-states, with their own languages. Critical to this reorganization was point one: the printing press meant everyone could have access to the Bible, or read pamphlets challenging the Catholic Church. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses was one such example: printing presses spread the challenge to papal authority far and wide precisely because it was so incendiary — that was good for business.

Ben's basically saying that information technology kicked off a domino effect that changed the entire political fabric of the world. That's huge. I'd always considered information tech to shake up other systems, such as news outlets and the internet, but not countries. I guess it does take longer than one's lifespan for those changes to take place, but still.

Ben's point also reminded me of another similar one I'd read in David Graeber's Debt, where (I'm going to summarize and likely butcher) David posits coinage was the key differentiator in how the Roman empire could sustain such a vast empire for so long. Prior to gold/silver based coins, most economic activity was debt based. David also distinguishes these two systems as hard and soft money, and suggests that economies swing back and forth between the two throughout history. Obviously today we mostly use soft money that is fiat (much to the dismay of gold bugs and bitcoin maxis).

Coinage was a technological innovation back in the day. One can even argue coinage's modern day equivalent is crypto. Tbd whether crypto will trigger a similar structural change in the near future, although my 2c is no because crypto provides the same benefits to fiat based currencies (via stablecoins) as it does for "hard" ones such as bitcoin.

It is interesting to consider technology as a mental model that provides leverage to the primary modes of humanity: information, value and power (my made up classification). As new technologies provide a step function change in any of the above, over the long term it can trigger massive secular waves in how human organize themselves.

We'll see what happens with AI and to which (if not all) of humanity's primary modes it provides the leverage to cause massive changes.