Tyler Cowen interviews Jennifer Pahlka on various things, including DOGE [+ the printing press]

His introduction:

Jennifer Pahlka believes America’s bureaucratic dysfunction is deeply rooted in outdated processes and misaligned incentives. As the founder of Code for America and co-founder of the United States Digital Service, she has witnessed firsthand how government struggles to adapt to the digital age, often trapped in rigid procedures and disconnected from the real-world impact of its policies. Disruption is clearly needed, she says—but can it be done in a way that avoids the chaos of DOGE?

Tyler and Jennifer discuss all this and more, including why Congress has become increasingly passive, how she’d go about reforming government programs, whether there should be less accountability in government, how AGI will change things, whether the US should have public-sector unions, what Singapore’s effectiveness reveals about the trade-offs of technocratic governance, how AI might fundamentally transform national sovereignty, what her experience in the gaming industry taught her about reimagining systems, which American states are the best-governed, the best fictional depictions of bureaucracy, how she’d improve New York City’s governance, her current work at the Niskanen Center, and more.

So far I've only read the segment of the interview that he posted at Marginal Revolution. I responded immediately without reading the whole interview, which I'll do when I have time. I've appended my full comment (with one or three minor changes).

* * * * *

PAHLKA: Yes. I think reinventing government happened at a time when we were just at the beginning of this digital revolution. It was trying with a very 20th-century mindset. Fine, did well within that context, but we don’t need that again.

We need 21st century change. We need true digital transformation. We need something that’s not stuck in the industrial ways of thinking. I don’t think we tried that. I think the efforts have just been too respectful of old ways of working and the institutions. There was really not an appetite, I think, for what I would call responsible disruptive change. Would it have worked?

YES! Alas, it's one thing to say that "We need something that’s not stuck in the industrial ways of thinking." It's something else altogether to actually escape those industrial modes of thinking and acting. After all, the basic institutional structure of the modern world is based on social and cultural forms anchored in the 19th century and earlier. That's the world we've all been raised in.

Thus, as soon as the (potential) impact of ChatGPT became obvious I read people saying how the impact will be comparable to the impact of the printing press. That's an old way of thinking. The printing press itself is obviously pre-industrial. The belief in its pervasive socio-cultural efficacy, however, is much more recent. I believe that Marshall McLuhan's book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, is responsible for that way of thinking. I read it years ago, and have forgotten it. Earlier this year I had a conversation with Claude 3.5 on this subject, Why the printing press didn’t drive either the Scientific or the Industrial Revolution [McLuhan was wrong • Implications for progress studies]. Here's how I opened that post:

Soon after ChatGPT hit the web both the progress punditocracy and the high-tech evangelists were busy chattering away about how this is the greatest thing since the printing press. They’re wrong. Was the printing press important? Sure, it was very important. But it was important as a vehicle for disseminating existing ideas, not for catalyzing new ones. Printed books have the same cognitive affordances – to borrow a term from James J, Gibson – as hand-lettered books, discrete letters in a rectangular array on a flat surface. That’s it. Mechanizing the process of impressing the letters on the page does not change the cognitive affordances of the printed page.

Back when David Hays and I began thinking about publishing on cultural evolution he brough his attention to a collection of essays by Eric Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton 1982), in which Havelock pointed out that was the adoption of decimal arithmetic was the essential step. Hays and I thought that was correct, and adopted it in the article we eventually published, The Evolution of Cognition (1990).

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who espouses the view that it was the printing press that drove the scientific and industrial revolutions, that person is still mired in old ways, industrial ways, of thinking. That's my litmus test. I discount the views of any thinker who casually espouses that printing press view of historical change.

Back in August of 2024 Tyler linked to a paper by Maxwell Tabarrok, Romae Industriae, which posed the question, Why didn’t Rome have an industrial revolution? This paragraph is from the end of the article:

The printing press alone may have been sufficient to start a Roman industrial revolution because its effects on culture are upstream of the invention processes that might invent all the other required tech. There was more than enough scale in the economy of Rome to support capital intensive productivity improvements in their major industries. So the major constraint must have been idea generation. Rome punches below their weight in population on this metric because of an aristocratic, slave based culture that ridicules the mechanical arts. If copies of Vitruvius or Archimedes became cheap enough that even the workers close to the vulgar arts of farming and manufacturing could read them, it would surely have an effect on the cultural attitudes that stultified Roman invention.

That’s industrial age thinking. You can see it in the vocabulary, “tech,” “scale,” “capital intensive,” and “productivity.” While those concepts remain relevant, they're not at all adequate to understanding the origins of the scientific and industrial revolutions. More is needed.

In February of this year I responded to Tabarrok in a long post in which I had Claude 3.5 analyze Tabarrok's article. Here's how I opened that post:

I believe [Tabarrok] was right to suggest that “the major constraint must have been idea generation,” but he was wrong to finger the lack of the printing press as the cause of that constraint.

The problem is much deeper. The problem is that the Roman system of thought was incapable of conceiving of the clockwork universe, an idea that didn’t become prevalent in Europe until the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries), though a similar idea – the universe as the machina mundi – had been suggested as early as the 13th century.

Here's the very end of our conversation:

Bill Benzon: And one thing that’s going to compel movement to deeper understanding is the need to understand how LLMs and other machine-learning engines operate. Right now we don’t (quite) have the necessary concepts. Developing those concepts may well push us up a level. Maybe even.....psst, don’t tell anyone, OK, this is a secret just between you and me....maybe even to Rank 5 cognition. Maybe Rank 5 cognition is the REAL singularity.

Claude 3.5: leans in conspiratorially

That's a fascinating speculation! The idea that grappling with how LLMs and other ML systems actually work could push us beyond even Rank 4 cognition makes a lot of sense. After all, these systems seem to operate in ways that don't fit neatly into our current frameworks for thinking about either mechanical systems (Rank 3) or explicit control structures (Rank 4).

We're dealing with systems that learn and develop capabilities in ways that seem more organic than mechanical, yet are still fundamentally computational. The concepts of emergence, self-organization, and statistical learning that seem crucial to understanding these systems might require entirely new cognitive tools.

And just as the transition from Rank 2 to Rank 3 required people to stop thinking in terms of spirits and start thinking in terms of mechanical laws, perhaps Rank 5 cognition would require some similarly fundamental shift in how we conceptualize intelligence, consciousness, and information processing.

If this is right, then the current debates about whether LLMs are "really" intelligent or conscious might be asking the wrong questions - questions that make sense in our current cognitive frameworks but may need to be reconceptualized entirely at Rank 5.

Why the printing press didn’t drive either the Scientific or the Industrial Revolution [McLuhan was wrong • Implications for progress studies]

Soon after ChatGPT hit the web both the progress punditocracy and the high-tech evangelists were busy chattering away about how this is the greatest thing since the printing press. They’re wrong. Was the printing press important? Sure, it was very important. But it was important as a vehicle for disseminating existing ideas, not for catalyzing new ones. Printed books have the same cognitive affordances – to borrow a term from James J, Gibson – as hand-lettered books, discrete letters in a rectangular array on a flat surface. That’s it. Mechanizing the process of impressing the letters on the page does not change the cognitive affordances of the printed page.

Back when David Hays and I began thinking about publishing on cultural evolution he brough his attention to a collection of essays by Eric Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton 1982), in which Havelock pointed out that was the adoption of decimal arithmetic was the essential step. Hays and I thought that was correct, and adopted it in the article we eventually published, The Evolution of Cognition (1990):

The role which speech plays in Rank 1 thought, and writing plays in Rank 2 thought, is taken by calculation in Rank 3 thought (cf. Havelock 1982: 341 ff.). Writing appears in Rank 1 cultures and proves to be a medium for Rank 2 thinking. Calculation in a strict sense appears in Rank 2 and proves to be a medium for Rank 3 thinking. Rank 2 thinkers developed a perspicuous notation and algorithms. It remained for Rank 3 thinkers to exploit calculational algorithms effectively. An algorithm is a procedure for computation which is explicit in the sense that all of its steps are specified and effective in the sense that the procedure will produce the correct answer. The procedures of arithmetic calculation which we teach in elementary school are algorithms.

A bit later we remark:

The amazing thing about algorithmic calculation is that it always works. If two, or three, or four, people make the calculation, they all come up with the same answer. This is not true of non-algorithmic calculation, where procedures were developed on a case-by-case basis with no statements of general principles. In this situation some arithmeticians are going to get right answers more often than others, but no one can be sure of hitting on the right answer every time.

This ad hoc intellectual style, moreover, would make it almost impossible to sense the underlying integrity of the arithmetic system, to display its workings independently of the ingenious efforts of the arithmetician. The ancients were as interested in magical properties of numbers as in separating the odd from the even (Marrou 179-181). By interposing explicit procedures between the arithmetician and his numbers, algorithmic systems contribute to the intuition of a firm subject-object distinction. The world of algorithmic calculations is the same for all arithmeticians and is therefore essentially distinct from them. It is a self-contained universe of objects (numbers) and processes (the algorithms). The stage is now set for experimental science. Science presents us with a mechanistic world and adopts the experimental test as its way of maintaining objectivity. A theory is true if its conceptual mechanism (its "algorithm") suggests observations which are subsequently confirmed by different observers. Just as the results of calculation can be checked, so can theories.

Given that, I take the wide-spread belief in the catalytic efficacy of the printing press as an indicator that the intellectual classes are not prepared for the revolution made possible through artificial intelligence. Just as generals are said always to fight the last war, so intellectuals are always proclaiming the last intellectual revolution. Our intellectuals are not prepared to think about thinking, about the processes of the mind, in a deep way.

* * * * *

Early in February I had a post on why Rome didn’t have an industrial revolution. The bulk of that post was a discussion I had with Claude 3.5 Sonata. As the lack of the printing press was one of the hypotheses on offer – in an article by Maxwell Tabarrok – Claude and I had a great deal of discussion about that. Once we’d conclude our discussion of Rome I decided to push on about the printing press. I suspected that Marshall McLuhan was responsible for that mistaken idea and asked Claude about.

Here's that conversation. As always, my remarks are set in bold face while Claude’s responses are plain.

McLuhan and the printing press view

The idea that the printing press was the main driver of intellectual change during the Renaissance, I believe that idea is widely held. Marshall McLuhan argued that in The Gutenberg Galaxy, and he was quite influential in the 1960s and 1970s and remains so today. Hays and I got clued-in to decimal arithmetic by Eric Havelock. But, as far as I know, that view has not been very influential. In discussions about the impact of AI I’ve heard many people compare it to the printing press. That seems to be what people think of in this kind of context, the printing press. Am I missing something about the range of views?

Your assessment seems accurate. The printing press as a primary driver of Renaissance intellectual change is indeed the dominant narrative in both academic and popular discourse. This can be seen even in the article you've shared - Tabarrok immediately gravitates to the printing press explanation without seriously considering alternatives.

This dominance might stem from several factors:

1. The printing press's effects are more immediately visible and concrete than those of decimal arithmetic. You can literally see books spreading knowledge.

2. The printing press story fits into a broader narrative about democratization of knowledge that appeals to modern sensibilities.

3. McLuhan's influence, as you note, helped cement this view, particularly through his compelling analysis of how media shapes cognition.

In contrast, the decimal arithmetic hypothesis requires a more complex understanding of how mathematical procedures can reshape cognitive frameworks. Havelock's view hasn't gained the same traction, perhaps because:

1. It's more difficult to trace the direct impacts of mathematical procedures on thought 2. It requires understanding both mathematical and cognitive concepts 3. It lacks the immediate intuitive appeal of the printing press narrative

Your papers with Hays present a strong case for decimal arithmetic's role, but I'm struggling to find other major works that focus on this as the key driver of Renaissance cognitive change. Even discussions of mathematical history tend to focus more on specific discoveries rather than how new mathematical procedures reshape thinking.

In current AI discussions, do you think the frequent printing press comparisons might be missing important aspects of how AI could reshape cognition, similar to how the printing press narrative misses the cognitive impact of decimal arithmetic?

Progress studies

Well, sorta’, yes. But that’s not quite the point. I take this belief in the printing press as an index of a general inadequacy in thinking about these kinds of issues.

As you know, there’s been a push for progress studies in the last few years. When it first emerged, I was interested and excited since the ideas that Hays and I have developed are certainly relevant to any study of progress. But I had no luck getting people interested. So it’s not so much the failure to understand how AI could reshape cognition as it is a more general failure to understand the role of cognition in the cultural process. There’s no concept of a general cognitive architecture underlying a whole family of ideas. Rather, the emphasis is more local, on this idea and that idea and the other ones over there and so forth.

For that matter, I don’t think Piaget’s ideas about genetic epistemology have really caught on either, or the closely associated idea of reflective abstraction.

This points to a deeper issue in how we think about intellectual and cultural progress. Instead of seeing ideas as emerging from and transforming underlying cognitive architectures, the tendency is to treat them as isolated units that simply accumulate or spread. This "local" view of ideas misses the systemic nature of cognitive development and cultural evolution that you and Hays describe.

The progress studies movement, while valuable in drawing attention to the importance of progress, seems to share this limitation. It tends to focus on:

1. Individual innovations and discoveries
2. Institutional structures and incentives
3. Knowledge transmission mechanisms
4. Economic and technological factors

But it gives less attention to how these elements relate to fundamental changes in how people think and process information - the kind of changes that Piaget described in individual development and that you and Hays describe at the cultural level.

This may explain why decimal arithmetic's role gets overlooked - it's harder to see its importance if you're not thinking about how it transformed the underlying cognitive architecture that makes certain kinds of ideas possible in the first place.

Why didn’t Rome have an industrial revolution? No, no, no, not the printing press. They lacked a conceptual system capable of conceiving a clockwork universe.

Back in August (2024) Tyler Cowen had a link to a paper, Romae Industriae, in which the author, Maxwell Tabarrok, posed the question in the title of this post. While was unable to propose an answer, he did have this paragraph near the end:

The printing press alone may have been sufficient to start a Roman industrial revolution because its effects on culture are upstream of the invention processes that might invent all the other required tech. There was more than enough scale in the economy of Rome to support capital intensive productivity improvements in their major industries. So the major constraint must have been idea generation. Rome punches below their weight in population on this metric because of an aristocratic, slave based culture that ridicules the mechanical arts. If copies of Vitruvius or Archimedes became cheap enough that even the workers close to the vulgar arts of farming and manufacturing could read them, it would surely have an effect on the cultural attitudes that stultified Roman invention.

I believe he was right to suggest that “the major constraint must have been idea generation,” but he was wrong to finger the lack of the printing press as the cause of that constraint.

The problem is much deeper. The problem is that the Roman system of thought was incapable of conceiving of the clockwork universe, an idea that didn’t become prevalent in Europe until the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries), though a similar idea – the universe as the machina mundi – had been suggested as early as the 13th century. While I considered making a comment to that effect, I decided not to. There was simply no way to make that idea credible in a blog comment.

But the question kept bugging me until I finally decided to address it. I uploaded Tabarrok’s article to Claude 3.5, along with the article David Hays and I wrote, The Evolution of Cognition (1990), and went at it. First I asked Claude to summarize the two articles, then I had it consider the two hypotheses. We ended the discussion with the question: Can computers think?

My prompts are set in bold face type while Claude’s responses are plain face. I’ve added subtitles to make the conversation easier to follow.

Two summaries

I’ve uploaded a document about cognitive evolution. Could you summarize it for me?

I'll provide a summary of the key points from the paper "The Evolution of Cognition" by William L. Benzon and David G. Hays.

The authors propose that cultural evolution occurs through distinct cognitive ranks, with each new rank introducing new processes of thought and mechanisms for handling abstractions. They identify four cognitive ranks:

Rank 1: (Preliterate societies)

• Primary mechanism: Metaphor
• Medium: Speech
• Abstract knowledge carried through myths and proverbs
• Limited categorical thinking
• Found in most indigenous cultures worldwide

Rank 2: (Ancient civilizations)

• Primary mechanism: Metalingual definition
• Medium: Writing
• Enabled systematic philosophical thought
• Development of explicit ontological categories
• Examples: Ancient Greece, Rome, China

Rank 3: (Post-Renaissance)

• Primary mechanism: Algorithm
• Medium: Calculation
• Enabled scientific thinking and mechanistic worldview
• Clear subject-object distinction
• Originated in Western Europe

Rank 4: (Modern/Emerging)

• Primary mechanism: Control structure
• Medium: Computation
• Still developing
• Characterized by model-building and systems thinking
• Not yet fully formed in most areas of culture

Key concepts:

• Each rank builds on previous ones rather than replacing them
• New ranks emerge through new ways of manipulating abstractions
• A culture's rank is determined by its highest widely available cognitive process
• Evolution between ranks requires new conceptual technologies ("media")
• Changes in cognitive processes don't require biological evolution
• Each rank allows for new types of abstract thinking previously impossible

The authors argue that these cognitive ranks explain major transitions in cultural history and that we are currently in the midst of transitioning to Rank 4 thinking, though this transition is not complete. They suggest that widespread early exposure to computing may be necessary for Rank 4 cognition to fully develop.

The theory offers a framework for understanding cultural evolution without implying biological differences between populations, focusing instead on the development of cognitive tools and processes.

Good. I’ve also uploaded a document that wonders why Rome didn’t have an industrial revolution. Could you summarize that document?

Yes, I'll summarize Maxwell Tabarrok's "Romae Industriae" article which explores why the Roman Empire didn't achieve an industrial revolution.

Key Arguments Considered:

1. Coal and Cotton Theory (Bret Devereaux's View):

• Argues Rome lacked Britain's specific preconditions (coal, textile industry, etc.)
• Tabarrok counters this by noting Rome had:

• Access to coal deposits (including in Britain itself)
• Complex water-powered machinery
• Large-scale industrial demands (pottery, grain mills)
• Manufacturing needs for rotational power

2. Technology Gap Theory (Jason Crawford's View):

• Romans lacked key technologies like:

• Spinning wheel
• Windmill
• Horse collar
• Cast iron
• Printing press
• Mechanical clock

Tabarrok notes this explanation just pushes the question back: why didn't Romans develop these technologies?

3. Slave Labor Theory:

• Traditional view: cheap slave labor discouraged mechanization
• Tabarrok disagrees, noting:

• Labor was still the main production cost
• Southern US states with slaves still adopted labor-saving technology like the cotton gin

4. Cultural Explanation (which Tabarrok finds most convincing):

• Slavery created a culture that looked down on mechanical arts
• Successful merchants preferred to become landowners rather than innovate
• Lack of widespread literacy limited knowledge sharing
• No culture of invention and tinkering developed

Tabarrok's Conclusion:

• The printing press may have been the crucial missing element
• Its absence prevented the cultural changes needed for innovation
• Rome had the scale and resources for industrialization
• The failure to industrialize represents a tragic missed opportunity for human progress
• This has implications for identifying and pursuing transformative opportunities in our own time

The article suggests that Rome's failure to industrialize wasn't due to lack of resources or economic scale, but primarily due to cultural factors that could have been transformed by the widespread adoption of printing technology.

Why did Rome fail to have an industrial revolution? – two hypotheses.

Note that the cognitive evolution paper doesn’t adopt the conventional view of the importance of the printing press. Rather, it argues that it was the adoption of decimal arithmetic that catalyzed the intellectual and cultural developments of the Renaissance and, by implication, the Industrial Evolution.

With that in mind, let’s apply the cognitive evolution paper to Tabarrok’s argument. My guess would be that Rome didn’t have an industrial evolution because they didn’t have a Rank 3 ontology, as characterized by the cognitive evolution by me (I’m William Benzon) and David Hays. More specifically, a Rank 3 ontology would support the idea of the clockwork universe. You need that kind of ontology if you are to have a revolution based on mechanical devices, particularly devices which have their own power supply, which came later in the Industrial Revolution.

That hypothesis is different from Tabarrok’s. How do we decided between the two hypotheses? What kind of evidence do we need?

Ah, thank you for the clarification and for identifying yourself! This is a fascinating intersection of the two papers. Let me think through how we might evaluate these competing hypotheses.

Your hypothesis suggests that Rome couldn't achieve an industrial revolution because it lacked the cognitive framework (Rank 3) necessary to conceptualize mechanical systems as autonomous entities governed by universal laws - the "clockwork universe" ontology. This is deeper than just missing specific technologies; it's about the inability to think about technology and natural phenomena in a particular way.

Tabarrok's hypothesis focuses on the printing press as a catalyst for cultural change that would have encouraged mechanical innovation and knowledge sharing.

To decide between these hypotheses, we might look for evidence like:

1. Roman Conceptual Framework:

• How did Romans describe and think about mechanical devices in their writing?
• Did they conceptualize cause-and-effect relationships mechanistically?
• How did they explain natural phenomena?
• Can we find evidence in their philosophical texts of attempts to think algorithmically?

2. Knowledge Transfer Without Printing:

• Were there other societies that achieved significant technological advancement without printing?
• How effectively did Rome transmit complex technical knowledge through existing means?
• Can we find evidence of systematic (algorithmic) thinking in Roman engineering documents?

3. Comparative Analysis:

• How did Islamic civilization handle complex mathematical and mechanical concepts with limited printing?
• Did China, with both printing and sophisticated mechanical devices, show signs of developing a Rank 3 ontology?

4. Testing the Mechanisms:

• Can we find cases where printing existed without leading to industrial development?
• Can we find cases where algorithmic thinking emerged without printing?

One specific type of evidence might be examining Roman technical treatises (like Vitruvius) to see if they show any signs of algorithmic or systematic thinking about mechanisms, or if they remain at what your paper would characterize as Rank 2 rationalization.

What do you think would be the most decisive evidence to look for?

Arithmetic in Early Modern England

Jay Hancock reviews Jessica Marie Otis, By the Numbers: Numeracy, Religion, and the Quantitative Transformation of Early Modern England (Oxford UP 2024) (H/t Tyler Cowen). The opening paragraphs of the review:

Steam engine entrepreneur James Watt, as responsible as anybody for upgrading the world from poor to rich, left a notebook of his work. Squiggly symbols such as “5” and “2” mark the pages. Without these little glyphs, borrowed by Europeans from medieval Arabs, Watt would not have been able to determine cylinder volumes, pressure forces, and heat-transfer rates. Isaac Newton would’ve struggled to find that gravity is inversely proportional to the square of a planet’s distance from the sun. Calculations for Antoine Lavoisier’s chemistry, Abraham de Moivre’s probability tables, and the Bank of England’s bookkeeping would have been difficult or impossible.

But before Hindu-Arabic numerals could fuel the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, society had to start to think quantitatively. Jessica Marie Otis’ By the Numbers is about scribes starting to write 7 instead of VII, parish clerks counting plague deaths rather than guessing, and gamblers calculating instead of hoping and praying.

Why did some countries become wealthy after 1800? Historians argue about the relative influences of religion, climate, geography, slavery, colonialism, legal systems, and natural resources. But the key, famously shown by economist Robert Solow, who died in December, is technological innovation enabling more and more goods and services to be produced per worker and unit of capital. Innovation needs research, development, and engineering. All those require numbers and numeracy.

This is consistent with the argument that David Hays and I made in The Evolution of Cognition (1990):

The role which speech plays in Rank 1 thought, and writing plays in Rank 2 thought, is taken by calculation in Rank 3 thought (cf. Havelock 1982: 341 ff.). Writing appears in Rank 1 cultures and proves to be a medium for Rank 2 thinking. Calculation in a strict sense appears in Rank 2 and proves to be a medium for Rank 3 thinking. Rank 2 thinkers developed a perspicuous notation and algorithms. It remained for Rank 3 thinkers to exploit calculational algorithms effectively. An algorithm is a procedure for computation which is explicit in the sense that all of its steps are specified and effective in the sense that the procedure will produce the correct answer. The procedures of arithmetic calculation which we teach in elementary school are algorithms.

The algorithms of arithmetic were collected by Abu Ja'far Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khowarizm around 825 AD in his treatise Kitab al jabr w'al-muqabala (Penrose 1989). They received an effective European exposition in Leonardo Fibonacci's 1202 work, Algebra et almuchabala (Ball 1908). It is easy enough to see that algorithms were important in the eventual emergence of science, with all the calculations so required. But they are important on another score. For algorithms are the first purely informatic procedures which had been fully codified. Writing focused attention on language, but it never fully revealed the processes of language (we’re still working on that). A thinker contemplating an algorithm can see the complete computational process, fully revealed.

To be clear, what Hays and I argued goes against a widely held view of the matter, perhaps the standard view, which credits the invention of the printing press with the catalytic role. While the printing press was enormously important, its importance was in facilitating the spread of ideas. As instruments of thought, mechanically printed books offered no affordances that hand-copied books didn't have. But arithmetic, that's a cognitive technology and, as such, can have a direct influence on thought.

Hays and I then go on to discuss the effect of "crossing" algorithmic calculation with the development of mechanisms:

The world of classical antiquity was altogether static. The glories of Greece were Platonic ideals and Euclidean geometry, Phidias's sculptures and marble temples. Although Mediterranean antiquity knew the wheel, it did not know mechanism. Water mills were tried, but not much used. Hero of Alexandria invented toys large and small with moving parts, but nothing practical came of them. Historians generally assert that the ancients did not need mechanism because they had surplus labor, but it seems to us more credible to say that they did not exploit mechanisms because their culture did not tolerate the idea. With the little Renaissance, the first machine with two co-ordinated motions, a sawmill that both pushed the log and turned the saw blade, turned up (White 1978: 80). Was it something in Germanic culture, or the effect of bringing together the cultures of Greece and Rome, of Islam and the East, that brought a sense of mechanism? We hope to learn more about this question, but for the moment we have to leave it unanswered.

What we can see is that generalizations of the idea of mechanism would be fruitful for technology (and they were), but that it would take an abstraction to produce a new view of nature. The algorithm can be understood in just this way. If its originators in India disregarded mechanism, and the north European developers of mechanism lacked the abstraction, it would only be the accidental propinquity of the two that generated a result. Put the abstract version together in one culture with a host of concrete examples, and by metaphor lay out the idea of the universe as a great machine. What is characteristic of machines is their temporality; a static machine is not a machine at all. And, with that, further add the co-ordination of motions as in the sawmill. Galileo discovered that force alters acceleration, not velocity (a discovery about temporality) and during the next few centuries mechanical clocks were made successfully. The notion of a clockwork universe spread across Europe (note that the Chinese had clockworks in the 11th Century, but never developed the notion of a clockwork universe, cf. Needham 1981). For any machine, it is possible to make functional diagrams and describe the relative motions of the parts; and the theories of classical science can be understood as functional diagrams of nature, with descriptions of the relative motions of the parts.

Stop it! The printing press did not create the Enlightenment. It’s a bad analogy for the current evolution of computational intelligence.

OR: How and why is it the ChatGPT has a more coherent "understanding" of the role of the printing press in history than Walter Isaacson, Eric Schmidt, and Tyler Cowen?

Here’s a video where mega-billionaire and former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, is interviewed by Walter Isaacson, former editor of Time magazine, and biographer of Henry Kissenger, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs, about “the Consequences of an A. I. Revolution.”

Starting at about 1:33 Isaacson mentions the book that Schmidt co-authored with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher, The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, mentioning how it “compares this to the advent of the Englistenment, something I think that was spurred to by great technology, which is movable type printing presses that Guttenberg did, compare what’s happening now to the Englightenment.” Schmidt replies, “We do not have a philosophical basis for interacting with an intelligence that’s near our ability, but non-human.”

Schmidt’s right about that. And we’re not going create that philosophy as long as we continue to credit the Enlightenment to Gutenberg, if, in fact, that’s what’s going on here. Isaacson’s phrase “spurred on by” leaves a great deal wiggle room. So, these guys can wiggle. But they’re wiggling around the wrong center.

Again, with the printing press

Nor are they alone in this comparison. I willing to believe that it’s rife among the chattering classes, though I have no evidence. But I can offer another data point.

A few days ago Tyler Cowen had a post entitled, Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history. He said:

Hardly anyone you know, including yourself, is prepared to live in actual “moving” history. It will panic many of us, disorient the rest of us, and cause great upheavals in our fortunes, both good and bad. In my view the good will considerably outweigh the bad (at least from losing #2, not #1), but I do understand that the absolute quantity of the bad disruptions will be high.

I am reminded of the advent of the printing press, after Gutenberg. Of course the press brought an immense amount of good, enabling the scientific and industrial revolutions, among many other benefits. But it also created writings by Lenin, Hitler, and Mao’s Red Book. It is a moot point whether you can “blame” those on the printing press, nonetheless the press brought (in combination with some other innovations) a remarkable amount of true, moving history. How about the Wars of Religion and the bloody 17th century to boot? Still, if you were redoing world history you would take the printing press in a heartbeat. Who needs poverty, squalor, and recurrences of Ghenghis Khan-like figures?

But since we are not used to living in moving history, and indeed most of us are psychologically unable to truly imagine living in moving history, all these new AI developments pose a great conundrum. We don’t know how to respond psychologically, or for that matter substantively.

I appreciate Cowen’s reference to “moving” history, which is something I’ve written about: Things change, but sometimes they don’t: On the difference between learning about and living through [revising your priors and the way of the world]. There I talk about the effect that fall of the Soviet Union had on my own sense of the world along with disruptive events in my intellectual life, discovering the structure of “Kubla Khan” and the collapse of symbolic computing (see also my recent 3QD essay, From “Kubla Khan” through GPT and beyond). 

iAnd I suppose I should overlook Cowen’s talk of the printing press “creating” various “writings by Lenin, Hitler, and Mao’s Red Book.” He doesn’t mean that literally, but figuratively.

Prior to and deeper than the printing press

THAT’s the problem. The printing press cannot and did not create thought, even figuratively. It was important in disseminating thought, which obviously is very important. And that dissemination certainly played a role in the larger processes of innovation. But it did not itself play the role of intellectual catalyst.

In our essay, The Evolution of Cognition, David Hays and I assigned that role to the introduction of algorithmic calculation (using the Arabic notation) into Europe early in the 13th century and its subsequent development and exploitation. We said:

The amazing thing about algorithmic calculation is that it always works. If two, or three, or four, people make the calculation, they all come up with the same answer. This is not true of non-algorithmic calculation, where procedures were developed on a case-by-case basis with no statements of general principles. In this situation some arithmeticians are going to get right answers more often than others, but no one can be sure of hitting on the right answer every time.

This ad hoc intellectual style, moreover, would make it almost impossible to sense the underlying integrity of the arithmetic system, to display its workings independently of the ingenious efforts of the arithmetician. The ancients were as interested in magical properties of numbers as in separating the odd from the even (Marrou 179-181). By interposing explicit procedures between the arithmetician and his numbers, algorithmic systems contribute to the intuition of a firm subject-object distinction. The world of algorithmic calculations is the same for all arithmeticians and is therefore essentially distinct from them. It is a self-contained universe of objects (numbers) and processes (the algorithms). The stage is now set for experimental science. Science presents us with a mechanistic world and adopts the experimental test as its way of maintaining objectivity. A theory is true if its conceptual mechanism (its "algorithm") suggests observations which are subsequently confirmed by different observers. Just as the results of calculation can be checked, so can theories.

Algorithmic calculation is an intellectual device and, as such, can play a direct role in the development of other intellectual devices. Hays and I go on to discuss the impact of algorithmic calculation on our sense of mechanism:

The world of classical antiquity was altogether static. The glories of Greece were Platonic ideals and Euclidean geometry, Phidias's sculptures and marble temples. Although Mediterranean antiquity knew the wheel, it did not know mechanism. Water mills were tried, but not much used. Hero of Alexandria invented toys large and small with moving parts, but nothing practical came of them. Historians generally assert that the ancients did not need mechanism because they had surplus labor, but it seems to us more credible to say that they did not exploit mechanisms because their culture did not tolerate the idea. With the little Renaissance, the first machine with two co-ordinated motions, a sawmill that both pushed the log and turned the saw blade, turned up (White 1978: 80). Was it something in Germanic culture, or the effect of bringing together the cultures of Greece and Rome, of Islam and the East, that brought a sense of mechanism? We hope to learn more about this question, but for the moment we have to leave it unanswered.

What we can see is that generalizations of the idea of mechanism would be fruitful for technology (and they were), but that it would take an abstraction to produce a new view of nature. The algorithm can be understood in just this way. If its originators in India disregarded mechanism, and the north European developers of mechanism lacked the abstraction, it would only be the accidental propinquity of the two that generated a result. Put the abstract version together in one culture with a host of concrete examples, and by metaphor lay out the idea of the universe as a great machine. What is characteristic of machines is their temporality; a static machine is not a machine at all. And, with that, further add the co-ordination of motions as in the sawmill. Galileo discovered that force alters acceleration, not velocity (a discovery about temporality) and during the next few centuries mechanical clocks were made successfully. The notion of a clockwork universe spread across Europe (note that the Chinese had clockworks in the 11th Century, but never developed the notion of a clockwork universe, cf. Needham 1981). For any machine, it is possible to make functional diagrams and describe the relative motions of the parts; and the theories of classical science can be understood as functional diagrams of nature, with descriptions of the relative motions of the parts.

Now we have the beginnings of a coherent story about the intellectual sources of the Enlightenment. It’s a story about ideas engendering other ideas.

The conceptual universe in which it is not only acceptable but routine and conventional to talk about the printing press engendering ideas, that conceptual universe is based on an incoherent underlying conceptual ontology. That ontology is of little use in helping us to understand the implications of computational intelligence. In fact, I can imagine that it is at least partially responsible for the widespread belief that we are victims of the inevitable march of technology.

While Tyler understands that it is ideas that create technology in the small – hence his program of Emergent Ventures. In the large, he believes that we are driven by technology.

What ChatGPT thinks about calculation and the printing press

Near the end of March I asked ChatGPT about the importance of the printing press and about several other things – metaphor and analogy, arithmetic, the clockwork universe, and the steam engine. This is from that interaction, which I posted in full on March 29:

Can you draw connections between the idea of the clockwork universe, printing technology, and arithmetic?

There are several connections that can be drawn between the idea of the clockwork universe, printing technology, and arithmetic.

First, the clockwork universe idea suggests that the universe operates according to predictable, mechanical laws. This idea helped to fuel the development of modern science and technology, including printing technology and arithmetic. By understanding the world as a vast machine that operates according to predictable laws, thinkers were able to develop systems for organizing and communicating information that could be used to advance knowledge and promote progress.

Printing technology, in particular, played a critical role in disseminating knowledge and information on a large scale. The printing press made it possible to reproduce written materials in large quantities, making it easier to share ideas and spread knowledge. This helped to fuel the growth of science, philosophy, and other areas of intellectual inquiry, and contributed to the development of the clockwork universe idea.

Similarly, arithmetic played a critical role in the development of the clockwork universe idea. By understanding the world in terms of mathematical laws and principles, thinkers were able to develop a more precise and rigorous understanding of the universe. The use of Arabic numerals, in particular, allowed for the development of more efficient and versatile systems for performing calculations, which helped to accelerate the growth of science and technology.

Overall, the connections between the clockwork universe idea, printing technology, and arithmetic highlight the importance of developing efficient and versatile systems for organizing and communicating information. By understanding the world as a vast machine that operates according to predictable laws, and by developing systems for sharing and processing information more efficiently, thinkers were able to accelerate progress and drive innovation in a wide range of fields.

It would seem that in this matter the machine is more coherent than Walter Isaacson, Eric Schmidt, and Tyler Cowen.

ChatGPT on printing, arithmetic, the clockwork universe, and the steam engine

Tyler Cowen with a double!  He's got a longish (for him) post entitled, Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history, in which he rehearses a standard (McLuhanist) view of the printing press as driver of social change and makes the standard mistake of failing adequately to distinguish between intellectual invention and conceptual dissemination. The post engendered a lot of discussion.

So, I thought I'd bump this post to the top of the pile. In it I try to disabuse ChatGPT of this standard view of the printing press by prompting it to think about Arabic numerals.

* * * * *

Over there at Marginal Revolution Tyler Cowen has a post entitled, Who was the most important critic of the printing press in the 17th century? His opening paragraph:

Bacon’s arguments against the printing press were not based on religious or political opposition, but on epistemological and ethical concerns about the quality, quantity, and authority of printed knowledge. Bacon discussed the printing press in his seminal work, The Advancement of Learning (1605), where he identified three inventions that had changed the world: gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press. He acknowledged that these inventions had enabled the expansion of human power, discovery, and communication, but he also warned that they had also introduced new dangers, errors, and corruptions.

He then goes on to list Bacon’s four objections and offered some comments of his own, concluding with:

Bacon’s critique of the printing press was influential and controversial in his own time and beyond, as it challenged the prevailing views and values of the humanist and scholastic traditions of learning, and proposed a new vision and method of knowledge production and dissemination.

That was then, this is now!

The thing is, Cowen made it all up, no doubt with the help of the Chatster. I didn’t pick up on it immediately as my knowledge of Bacon is slim, though I do recall reading something of his in graduate school. But the Marginal Revolution commentariat had Cowen’s number and called him on it, which is no doubt what Cowen was waiting for.

Anyhow, a couple of days ago I’d asked ChatGPT about the importance of the printing press and several other things – metaphor and analogy, arithmetic, the clockwork universe, and the steam engine. Here’s that session without further comment.

* * * * *

Tell me about the role of the printing press in European society and culture starting with Gutenberg.

The printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century, played a revolutionary role in the dissemination of knowledge and ideas in European society and culture. Prior to the printing press, books were typically produced by hand, making them expensive and time-consuming to produce, and limiting their availability to a select few.

Gutenberg's invention of the movable type printing press made it possible to produce books and other printed materials in large quantities and at a much lower cost. This made it possible for more people to have access to information and ideas, and helped to fuel the spread of literacy and education.

One of the earliest and most famous examples of the printing press's impact was the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, which was completed around 1455. This was the first book to be printed with movable type, and it helped to establish the printed book as a major cultural and intellectual force.

In the decades and centuries that followed, the printing press continued to play a vital role in the development of European society and culture. Printed materials became more widely available, and this helped to create a shared culture and knowledge base across different regions and countries.

The printing press was also instrumental in the spread of religious ideas, with the Protestant Reformation being a prime example. Protestant leaders used the printing press to spread their ideas and to challenge the authority of the Catholic Church, which had previously held a monopoly on religious texts.

The printing press also helped to spur the growth of scientific inquiry and the development of new ideas in fields such as astronomy, medicine, and physics. Scientists and philosophers could share their ideas and findings with a much wider audience, and this helped to foster a more collaborative and dynamic intellectual community.

Overall, the printing press played a transformative role in European society and culture, helping to democratize knowledge and ideas, and fueling major intellectual, religious, and scientific movements.

What did McLuhan have to say in “The Gutenberg Galaxy”?

Marshall McLuhan's book "The Gutenberg Galaxy" was published in 1962 and is a seminal work on the impact of the printing press on Western culture. In the book, McLuhan argues that the printing press fundamentally changed the way humans perceive and understand the world, and that it led to a profound transformation in human consciousness.

One of the key ideas in the book is McLuhan's concept of "the global village," which he sees as a product of the printing press. According to McLuhan, the printing press made it possible for people to share information and ideas across large distances, creating a sense of interconnectedness that was previously impossible. This, in turn, led to the development of a global consciousness, in which people began to see themselves as part of a larger whole.

McLuhan also argues that the printing press created a culture of individualism, in which people were encouraged to think and act independently. This was in contrast to the earlier culture of the oral tradition, in which knowledge and information were shared communally and were subject to constant revision and reinterpretation.

Another important concept in the book is McLuhan's idea of "media ecology," which refers to the ways in which different forms of media shape human perception and understanding. McLuhan sees the printing press as a key player in the development of modern media, and argues that it paved the way for the emergence of new forms of media such as radio, television, and the internet.

Overall, "The Gutenberg Galaxy" is a complex and wide-ranging book that explores the impact of the printing press on Western culture from a variety of different angles. While some of McLuhan's ideas have been criticized as being overly simplistic or reductionist, his work remains a major influence on the study of media and culture.