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> At the invention of the printing press, there were people with this same energy. Obviously those people were wrong. Were they? The first thing the printing

> At the invention of the printing press, there were people with this same energy. Obviously those people were wrong. Were they? The first thing the printing press did was to break Christianity. It's what made attempts at reforming the Catholic Church finally stick, enabling what we now call Reformation to happen. Reformation forever broke Christianity into pieces, and in the process it started a bunch of religious wars in Europe, as well as tons of neighborly carnage. > And if we had taken their "lesson", then human society would be in a much worse place. Was the invention of the printing press a net good for humanity? Most certainly so, looking back from today. Did people living back then knew what they were getting into? Not really. And since their share of the fruits of that invention was mostly bloodshed, job loss, and shattering of the world order they knew, I wouldn't blame them from being pissed off about getting the short end of the stick, and perhaps looking for ways to undo it. I'm starting to think that talking about inventions as good or bad (or the cop-out, "dual use") is bad framing. Rather, it seems to me that every major invention will eventually turn out beneficial[0], but introducing an invention always first extracts a cost in blood. Be it fire or printing press or atomic bomb, a lot of people end up suffering and dying before societies eventually figure out how to handle the new thing and do some good with it. I'm very much in favor of progress, but I understand the fear. No matter the ultimate benefits, we are the generation that cough up blood as payment for AI/AGI, and it ain't gonna be pleasant. -- [0] - Assuming they don't kill us first - see AGI.

shmeeed 2y ago
That's a very thought provoking insight regarding to the often repeated "printing press doomsayer" talking point. Thank you!
throwawayqqq11 2y ago
I dont understand, why any highly sophisticated AI should invest that much resources to kill us instead of investing it to relocating and protecting itself. Yes, ants could technically conspire to sneak up to you while you sleep and bite you all at once to kill you, so do you go out to eradicate all ants?
- _joel 2y ago
  "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > why any highly sophisticated AI should invest that much resources to kill us instead of investing it to relocating and protecting itself Why would it invest resources to relocate and protect itself when it could mitigate the threat directly? Or, why wouldn't it do both, by using our resources to relocate itself? In the famous words of 'Eliezer, that best sum up the "orthogonality thesis": The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else. > ants could technically conspire to sneak up to you while you sleep and bite you all at once to kill you, so do you go out to eradicate all ants? Ants are always a great case study. No, of course not. But if, one morning, you'll find ants in your kitchen, walking over your food, I don't imagine you'll gently collect them all and release in the nearby park. Most people would just stomp them out and call it a day. And, should the ants set up an anthill in your backyard and mount regular invasions of your kitchen, I imagine you'd eventually get pissed of and destroy the anthill. And I'm not talking about some monstrous fire ants like the ones that chew up electronics in the US, or some worse hell-spawn from Australia that might actually kill you. Just the regular tiny black ants. Moreover, people don't give a second thought to anthills when they're developing land. It stands where the road will go? It gets paved over. It sticks out where children will play? It gets removed.
  - andybak 2y ago
    > The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else. The value of atoms - or even the value of raw materials made of atoms is hopefully less than the value of information embodied in complex living things that have processed information from the ecosystem over millions of years via natural selection. Contingent complexity has inherent value. I think there's a claim to be made that AI is just as likely to value us (and complex life in general) as it is to see as a handy blob of hydrocarbons. This claim is at least as plausible as the original claim.
RandomLensman 2y ago
I think that is overstating the relevance of the printing press vs existing power struggles, rivalries, discontent, etc. - it wasn't some sort of vacuum that the reformation happened in, for example. Religious schisms happened before the printing press, too. There was the Great Schism in 1054 in Christianity, for example.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > it wasn't some sort of vacuum that the reformation happened in, for example. No, it wasn't. Wikipedia lists[0] over two dozen schisms that happened prior to Reformation. However, the capital R reformation was the big one, and the major reason it worked - why Luther succeeded where Hus failed a century earlier - was because of the printing press. It was print that allowed for Luther's treatises to rapidly spread among general population (Wikipedia cites some interesting claims here[1]), and across Europe. In today's terms, printing press is what allowed Reformation to get viral. This new technology is what made the revolution spread too fast for the Church to suppress it with methods that worked before. Of course, the Church survived, adapted, and embraced the printing press for its own goals too, like everyone else. But the adaptation period was a bloody one for Europe. And I only covered the religious aspects of the printing press's impact. There are similar stories to draw on more secular front, too. In fact, another general change printing introduced is to get regular folks more informed and involved in politics of their regions. That's a change for the better overall, too, but initially, it injected a lot of energy into socio-political systems that weren't used to it, leading to instability and more bloodshed before people got used to it and politics found a new balance. > existing power struggles, rivalries, discontent, etc. Those always exist, and stay in some form of equilibrium. Technology doesn't cause them - but what it does is disturb the old equilibrium, forcing society to find a new one, and this process historically often got violent. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schism_in_Christianity#Lists_of_Schisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schism_in_Christianity#Lists_o... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation#Spread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation#Spread - see e.g. footnote 28: "According to an econometric analysis by the economist Jared Rubin, "the mere presence of a printing press prior to 1500 increased the probability that a city would become Protestant in 1530 by 52.1 percentage points, Protestant in 1560 by 43.6 percentage points, and Protestant in 1600 by 28.7 percentage points."
short_sells_poo 2y ago
Thank you for this excellent comment! It seems then that basically everything that's revolutionary - whether technology, government, beliefs, and so on - will tend to extract a blood price before the dust settles. I guess it sort of makes sense: big societal upheavals are difficult to handle peacefully. So basically we are a bit screwed in our current timeline. We are at the cusp of a post-scarcity society, possibly reach AGI within our lifetimes and possibly even become a space faring civilization. However, it is highly likely that we are going to pay the pound of flesh and only subsequent generations - perhaps yet unborn - will be the ones who will be truly better off. I suppose it's not all doom and gloom, we can draw stoic comfort from the fact that people in the near future will have an incredibly exciting era full of discovery and wonder ahead of them!
- portaouflop 2y ago
  Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
  - IggleSniggle 2y ago
    In the grim darkness of the far future is the heat death of the universe. We are just a candle burning slower than a sun, powered by tidal forces and radiant energy, slowly conspiring to become a star.
kiratp 2y ago
> And since their share of the fruits of that invention was mostly bloodshed, job loss, and shattering of the world order they knew, I wouldn't blame them from being pissed off about getting the short end of the stick, and perhaps looking for ways to undo it. “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit”
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Trees are older than humanity, everyone knows how they work. The impact of new technologies is routinely impossible to forecast. Did Gutenberg expect his invention would, 150 years later, set the whole Europe ablaze, and ultimately break the hold the Church had over people? Did he expect it to be a key component leading to accumulation of knowledge that, 400 years later, will finally make technological progress visibly exponential? On that note, did Watt realize he's about to kick-start the exponent that people will ride all the way to the actual Moon less than 200 years later? Or did Goddard, Oberth and Tsiolkovsky realize that their work on rocketry will be critical in establishing world peace within a century, and that the way this peace will be established is through a Mexican standoff between major world powers, except with rocket-propelled city-busting bombs instead of guns?
soulofmischief 2y ago
It's not the fault of the printing press that the Church built its empire upon the restriction of information and was willing to commit bloodshed to hold onto its power. All you've done is explain why the printing press was so important and necessary in order to break down previous unwarranted power structures. I have a similar hope for AGI. The alternative is that the incompant power structure instead benefits from AGI and uses it for oppression, which would mean it's not comparable to the printing press as such.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  You're wrong in your characterization. The Church may have built its empire upon a degree of information control, but breaking that control alone does not explain what happened. Everyone getting a Bible in their language alone wasn't sufficient. What the printing press did was rapidly increase the amount, type, range and speed of information spread. That was a qualitative difference. The Church did not build its empire on restricting that, because before printing press, it was not even possible (or conceivable). My overall point wrt. inventions is this: yes, it may end up turning for the best. But at the time the invention of this magnitude appears and spreads, a) no one can tell how it'll pan out, and b) they get all the immediate, bloody downsides of disrupting the social order.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    > The Church did not build its empire on restricting that Masses were often held in Latin, printed material was typically written in Latin and Greek, and access to translated texts was frequently prohibited or admonished. They tried hard to silence those like Wycliffe who made the Bible more readily available to the masses, and he was posthumously denounced as a heretic by the Church. They absolutely wielded information as a tool of oppression. This is not a hill to die on, the historical facts are clear despite the efforts of the Church. > What the printing press did was rapidly increase the amount, type, range and speed of information spread Sure, but that's not the only thing it did.
    - achierius 2y ago
pipes 2y ago
I'm very glad that it broke the power of the Catholic church (and I was raised in a Catholic family). It allowed the enlightenment to happen and freedom from dogma. I don't think it it broke Christianity at all. It brought actual Christianity to the masses because the bible was printed in their own languages rather than Latin. The catholic church burnt people at the stake for creating non Latin bibles (William Tyndale for example).
relistan 2y ago
So much this
robwwilliams 2y ago
Lots of good content here, but the main group that “suffered” from the invention and spread of the printing press was the aristocracy, so i am not shedding tears. As for “breaking” Christianity: Christianity has been one schism after another for 2000 years: a schism from a schism from a schism. Power plays all the way down to Magog. Socrates complained about how writing and the big boom in using the new Greek alphabet was ruining civilization and true learning. And on and on it goes.
- froidpink 2y ago
  Not really. Before the Reformation there had only been one schism (Eastern Roman Empire - Orthodox; Western Roman Empire - Catholic). The Reformation was the time where fragmentation of Christianity really exploded
  - ike2792 2y ago
    There was the Arian heresy in the 4th century that caused a de facto schism and divided the Church off and on for a couple of centuries.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  The reformations wars lasted half a century and killed tens of millions. Parts of Europe were nearly depopulated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
  - robwwilliams 2y ago
    Yes, but I think massive technical improvements in munitions, methods of siege warfare and the switch to flintlocks and cartridges were much more proximal cause of destruction than the printing press. Give a ruler and ruling class a new weapon and off they go killing and destroying more “efficiently”.

shmeeed 2y ago

That's a very thought provoking insight regarding to the often repeated "printing press doomsayer" talking point. Thank you!

throwawayqqq11 2y ago

I dont understand, why any highly sophisticated AI should invest that much resources to kill us instead of investing it to relocating and protecting itself. Yes, ants could technically conspire to sneak up to you while you sleep and bite you all at once to kill you, so do you go out to eradicate all ants?

_joel 2y ago
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> why any highly sophisticated AI should invest that much resources to kill us instead of investing it to relocating and protecting itself Why would it invest resources to relocate and protect itself when it could mitigate the threat directly? Or, why wouldn't it do both, by using our resources to relocate itself? In the famous words of 'Eliezer, that best sum up the "orthogonality thesis": The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else. > ants could technically conspire to sneak up to you while you sleep and bite you all at once to kill you, so do you go out to eradicate all ants? Ants are always a great case study. No, of course not. But if, one morning, you'll find ants in your kitchen, walking over your food, I don't imagine you'll gently collect them all and release in the nearby park. Most people would just stomp them out and call it a day. And, should the ants set up an anthill in your backyard and mount regular invasions of your kitchen, I imagine you'd eventually get pissed of and destroy the anthill. And I'm not talking about some monstrous fire ants like the ones that chew up electronics in the US, or some worse hell-spawn from Australia that might actually kill you. Just the regular tiny black ants. Moreover, people don't give a second thought to anthills when they're developing land. It stands where the road will go? It gets paved over. It sticks out where children will play? It gets removed.
- andybak 2y ago
  > The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else. The value of atoms - or even the value of raw materials made of atoms is hopefully less than the value of information embodied in complex living things that have processed information from the ecosystem over millions of years via natural selection. Contingent complexity has inherent value. I think there's a claim to be made that AI is just as likely to value us (and complex life in general) as it is to see as a handy blob of hydrocarbons. This claim is at least as plausible as the original claim.

RandomLensman 2y ago

I think that is overstating the relevance of the printing press vs existing power struggles, rivalries, discontent, etc. - it wasn't some sort of vacuum that the reformation happened in, for example. Religious schisms happened before the printing press, too. There was the Great Schism in 1054 in Christianity, for example.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
> it wasn't some sort of vacuum that the reformation happened in, for example. No, it wasn't. Wikipedia lists[0] over two dozen schisms that happened prior to Reformation. However, the capital R reformation was the big one, and the major reason it worked - why Luther succeeded where Hus failed a century earlier - was because of the printing press. It was print that allowed for Luther's treatises to rapidly spread among general population (Wikipedia cites some interesting claims here[1]), and across Europe. In today's terms, printing press is what allowed Reformation to get viral. This new technology is what made the revolution spread too fast for the Church to suppress it with methods that worked before. Of course, the Church survived, adapted, and embraced the printing press for its own goals too, like everyone else. But the adaptation period was a bloody one for Europe. And I only covered the religious aspects of the printing press's impact. There are similar stories to draw on more secular front, too. In fact, another general change printing introduced is to get regular folks more informed and involved in politics of their regions. That's a change for the better overall, too, but initially, it injected a lot of energy into socio-political systems that weren't used to it, leading to instability and more bloodshed before people got used to it and politics found a new balance. > existing power struggles, rivalries, discontent, etc. Those always exist, and stay in some form of equilibrium. Technology doesn't cause them - but what it does is disturb the old equilibrium, forcing society to find a new one, and this process historically often got violent. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schism_in_Christianity#Lists_of_Schisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schism_in_Christianity#Lists_o... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation#Spread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation#Spread - see e.g. footnote 28: "According to an econometric analysis by the economist Jared Rubin, "the mere presence of a printing press prior to 1500 increased the probability that a city would become Protestant in 1530 by 52.1 percentage points, Protestant in 1560 by 43.6 percentage points, and Protestant in 1600 by 28.7 percentage points."

short_sells_poo 2y ago

Thank you for this excellent comment! It seems then that basically everything that's revolutionary - whether technology, government, beliefs, and so on - will tend to extract a blood price before the dust settles. I guess it sort of makes sense: big societal upheavals are difficult to handle peacefully. So basically we are a bit screwed in our current timeline. We are at the cusp of a post-scarcity society, possibly reach AGI within our lifetimes and possibly even become a space faring civilization. However, it is highly likely that we are going to pay the pound of flesh and only subsequent generations - perhaps yet unborn - will be the ones who will be truly better off. I suppose it's not all doom and gloom, we can draw stoic comfort from the fact that people in the near future will have an incredibly exciting era full of discovery and wonder ahead of them!

portaouflop 2y ago
Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
- IggleSniggle 2y ago
  In the grim darkness of the far future is the heat death of the universe. We are just a candle burning slower than a sun, powered by tidal forces and radiant energy, slowly conspiring to become a star.

kiratp 2y ago

> And since their share of the fruits of that invention was mostly bloodshed, job loss, and shattering of the world order they knew, I wouldn't blame them from being pissed off about getting the short end of the stick, and perhaps looking for ways to undo it. “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit”

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Trees are older than humanity, everyone knows how they work. The impact of new technologies is routinely impossible to forecast. Did Gutenberg expect his invention would, 150 years later, set the whole Europe ablaze, and ultimately break the hold the Church had over people? Did he expect it to be a key component leading to accumulation of knowledge that, 400 years later, will finally make technological progress visibly exponential? On that note, did Watt realize he's about to kick-start the exponent that people will ride all the way to the actual Moon less than 200 years later? Or did Goddard, Oberth and Tsiolkovsky realize that their work on rocketry will be critical in establishing world peace within a century, and that the way this peace will be established is through a Mexican standoff between major world powers, except with rocket-propelled city-busting bombs instead of guns?

soulofmischief 2y ago

It's not the fault of the printing press that the Church built its empire upon the restriction of information and was willing to commit bloodshed to hold onto its power. All you've done is explain why the printing press was so important and necessary in order to break down previous unwarranted power structures. I have a similar hope for AGI. The alternative is that the incompant power structure instead benefits from AGI and uses it for oppression, which would mean it's not comparable to the printing press as such.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
You're wrong in your characterization. The Church may have built its empire upon a degree of information control, but breaking that control alone does not explain what happened. Everyone getting a Bible in their language alone wasn't sufficient. What the printing press did was rapidly increase the amount, type, range and speed of information spread. That was a qualitative difference. The Church did not build its empire on restricting that, because before printing press, it was not even possible (or conceivable). My overall point wrt. inventions is this: yes, it may end up turning for the best. But at the time the invention of this magnitude appears and spreads, a) no one can tell how it'll pan out, and b) they get all the immediate, bloody downsides of disrupting the social order.
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  > The Church did not build its empire on restricting that Masses were often held in Latin, printed material was typically written in Latin and Greek, and access to translated texts was frequently prohibited or admonished. They tried hard to silence those like Wycliffe who made the Bible more readily available to the masses, and he was posthumously denounced as a heretic by the Church. They absolutely wielded information as a tool of oppression. This is not a hill to die on, the historical facts are clear despite the efforts of the Church. > What the printing press did was rapidly increase the amount, type, range and speed of information spread Sure, but that's not the only thing it did.
  - achierius 2y ago

pipes 2y ago

I'm very glad that it broke the power of the Catholic church (and I was raised in a Catholic family). It allowed the enlightenment to happen and freedom from dogma. I don't think it it broke Christianity at all. It brought actual Christianity to the masses because the bible was printed in their own languages rather than Latin. The catholic church burnt people at the stake for creating non Latin bibles (William Tyndale for example).

relistan 2y ago

So much this

robwwilliams 2y ago

Lots of good content here, but the main group that “suffered” from the invention and spread of the printing press was the aristocracy, so i am not shedding tears. As for “breaking” Christianity: Christianity has been one schism after another for 2000 years: a schism from a schism from a schism. Power plays all the way down to Magog. Socrates complained about how writing and the big boom in using the new Greek alphabet was ruining civilization and true learning. And on and on it goes.

froidpink 2y ago
Not really. Before the Reformation there had only been one schism (Eastern Roman Empire - Orthodox; Western Roman Empire - Catholic). The Reformation was the time where fragmentation of Christianity really exploded
- ike2792 2y ago
  There was the Arian heresy in the 4th century that caused a de facto schism and divided the Church off and on for a couple of centuries.
BurningFrog 2y ago
The reformations wars lasted half a century and killed tens of millions. Parts of Europe were nearly depopulated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
- robwwilliams 2y ago
  Yes, but I think massive technical improvements in munitions, methods of siege warfare and the switch to flintlocks and cartridges were much more proximal cause of destruction than the printing press. Give a ruler and ruling class a new weapon and off they go killing and destroying more “efficiently”.