The Next Enlightenment

The printing press made us readers. Artificial intelligence will decide whether we remain authors of our own lives

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 coll…