Johannes Gutenberg spent years cloistered in secrecy, perfecting a machine that could uniformly stamp letters onto a page. If his idea could spring from the confines of his mind and make it into the real world, everything would change. To finance the project, Gutenberg borrowed money from a wealthy merchant named Johann Fust, using his equipment as collateral. When profits from the endeavor were too slim and too slow, Fust sued, and in 1455 Gutenberg lost everything: the court case, his workshop, and the printing press itself.
Within a few months, Fust and one of Gutenberg’s apprentices were printing, not copying, the world’s first mass-produced Bible. Gutenberg, however, vanished from public life, forced to subsist on a modest pension bestowed by the Archbishop of Mainz.
Gutenberg unlocked the modern age, but he died penniless while others built entire empires atop his idea.
Tempting as it is to imagine that this is a cautionary tale about investors and visionaries, it’s more than that. The trial of Johannes Gutenberg was the first recorded moment when technology, money, and information collided. Gutenberg wasn’t simply inventing a machine of efficiency, he was creating a new way for ideas and information to multiply. Its genesis may have been a tool for copying scripture, but soon, it was an accelerant for everything humans could think, love, fear, or believe.
Less than a century after Gutenberg’s death, his invention changed the life of a young woman named Anne Boleyn.
Boleyn arrived at Henry VIII’s court around 1522 after she had spent years in France, where she had been exposed to many ideas that seemed radical at the time –– like the idea that people should be able to read scripture in their native language.
Around that same time, a scholar and linguist named William Tyndale was translating a New Testament from Greek to — gasp! –– English, which was considered an act of heresy under English law. He couldn’t find a printer in England willing to take the risk of reproducing his translation, so he fled to Germany, where he used Gutenberg’s technology to print his English New Testament on small, easily-smuggled pages that could then be shipped secretly back to England.
When one of these contraband books reportedly found its way into the hands of Anne Boleyn, she is said to have recognized both the power and the danger that she held. She presented Henry VIII with another work of Tyndale’s, The Obedience of a Christian Man. The book argued that kings, not popes, had authority over their own realms and that everyone had the right to read scripture on their own.
Within a few years, Henry VIII would break from Rome, declare himself the head of the Church of England, have Anne Boleyn executed, and set in motion a chain of political and religious upheavals that reshaped the world.
Tyndale was arrested, tied to a stake and strangled, his body burned to an unrecognizable corpse. But the English Bible he translated –– and the printed ideas Anne Boleyn helped move into the hands of a king –– could no longer be contained.
The printing press had done what no monarch or priest ever could: it made ideas portable. A single book, copied by machine, could leap from exile into a royal palace, from an outlaw to a sovereign, and reorder the moral and political structure of an entire civilization.
And that is the real power of revolutionary technology: not the machine’s design, but what comes after it’s used. Artificial intelligence is the movable type of the 21st century.
AI began as a niche experiment in language modeling, infused by venture capital and built largely in digital secrecy. A mere handful of years later, AI has escaped the lab it was conceived in and is now in the process of redefining authorship, expertise, and access to information. Like Gutenberg’s press, it makes two promises: it will democratize creation. And it will destabilize the systems that once controlled it.
Before Gutenberg, information moved at the speed of a man scratching a quill onto parchment. A single Bible could take more than a year to copy, and that meant Bibles came at great cost. In the West, knowledge was hoarded by monasteries and churches, and the cost of a single volume was often as much as a skilled tradesman’s yearly wages, and ornate versions could cost even more.
With a printing press, a page could be duplicated hundreds of times before the ink dried. Within several decades, the price of books fell dramatically, by as much as 60%. By 1500, more than 200 European cities had printing workshops, and those with presses had populations that grew roughly 50% faster than cities without them.
The parallels to the present moment are more than uncanny. Until recently, the production of knowledge –– lines of code, images, videos, essays –– was limited by human labor. Now, with generative AI, the bottleneck is gone. An algorithm can draft in seconds (granted, often quite imperfectly) what previously took days of human effort.
Both of these revolutions turned knowledge from something expensive and rare into something so plentiful that it changed the definition of truth. When there are a thousand copies of a text or ten million versions of an image, authenticity becomes harder to measure. In Gutenberg’s era, that confusion gave rise to pamphlet wars, forged indulgences, and counterfeit relics of saints. In ours, it manifests as deepfake videos, misinformation, and lies masquerading as breaking news. The question today is not how to find information, it’s how to trust it.
It’s easy to tell ourselves that every generation has panicked over the next big invention. People once feared (OK, who are we kidding, once feared?) that books would ruin our minds, planting seeds that never should take root in the fertile soil of impressionable humans. They believed radio would destroy our conversational skills, that TV would make us into dullards. And yet, like humans are wont to do, we adapted. Civilization carried on.
But this moment feels different — not just because of the speed of change, but because we’ve never invented something like this before. Everything that’s come before still needed us. Someone had to load the dishwasher or set the type or crank the wheel. Machines amplified what humans could do. But artificial intelligence is the first technology designed to work without us. It learns on its own; it adjusts on its own. It creates things we didn’t even ask for. The printing press needed someone to feed it words. Now, algorithms are making them up.
That’s not simply a technical issue; it’s one that has profound implications for what makes us human. Reasoning is not a chore, and making meaning of information is how we come to know ourselves. If we hand that work off to a robot, we are not just outsourcing putting widgets into a box, we are giving away the formation of our very identities.
I love it as much as the next person that I can pull out my phone calculator to multiply 396 by 28. But if we spare ourselves every effort, we sacrifice what the effort teaches us. What happens when we no longer need to reason at all? How long will it take for us to notice what we’ve lost — like the slow, frustrating process of turning information into wisdom?
At the center of this conversation lies a paradox. AI promises it will make us infinitely capable, but capability isn’t the same thing as competence. A civilization that can generate a million images a minute and encyclopedic volumes of words every hour might find itself surrounded by content but starved for meaning.
When creation costs us nothing, what is the value of what we create?
For all of history, hard-fought knowledge acted as a form of guardrail. You couldn’t build an atomic weapon without first acquiring a PhD-level knowledge in physics. You couldn’t deploy a virus capable of taking down an international banking system without first learning everything about how computers work. But if the know-how is automated, then a single bad actor can summon the skill of entire professions. This changes the moral math in ways we cannot yet predict.
The printing press made our ideas immortal, but AI makes them autonomous. And that is both the incredible opportunity we have before us and also the danger. Because what truly separates us from our inventions is not our intelligence, it’s our ability to care what that intelligence should be used for.
Gutenberg’s press would give rise to the Enlightenment and the flourishing of schools, libraries, and scientific discoveries. It pulled the written word out of monasteries and put it into the hands of ordinary people. For all its turmoil, it gave rise to an age where thinking for oneself became a moral act.
AI is going to demand something more. The first invention of knowledge made us readers. The second will test whether we remain the authors of our own lives –– our words, our ideas, and ourselves. What the algorithm will give rise to has yet to be inscribed in the history books. What a frightful consideration.
And what an extraordinary opportunity.