In 1492, a German monk named Johannes Trithemius sat down to write a passionate defense of an ancient practice he believed was dying. The subject of this particular defense was the hand-copying of manuscripts. At the time, for Benedictine monks, it was a painstaking, meditative labor by which they had preserved and transmitted human knowledge for centuries. But a new technology was arriving that could reproduce a text far faster than a person copying it by hand. It could get books into the hands of far more people, and maybe more importantly to Trithemius, it threatened to make the monk’s most sacred work unnecessary. Trithemius believed that abandoning the work would be a serious loss, and he wrote out the details of why this would be so devastating.
He called his treatise In Praise of Scribes. And when he was finally finished, he had it printed on a printing press.
It’s easy to laugh at the irony, but that doesn’t make his concern any less valid. Some of his objections were about the physical nature of the books themselves. He had practical concerns, including how long paper would last compared with parchment. But his primary concern was centered around what this new process would take away from the monks who were doing the transcribing.
The transcribing of these texts often took months to hand copy, and during that time, Trithemius believed that the monk gained something from spending so much time with the words. Something beyond just the ideas or the message in the text itself, and more importantly, something that wouldn’t be gained simply by reading the text if it was produced and delivered by a printing press.
His theory was that the true knowledge that the monk would gain came from the hours of slow, meditative repetition, and without that arduous labor, the monk might have the general ideas, but they wouldn’t possess the true knowledge of those sacred texts. What he was describing was a process we can now call internalization.
We have all experienced some form of internalization in our lives. There is a level of understanding when we read an explanation for something, but it is something else entirely when we can explain it to someone else days or weeks later. And that second level of understanding is what Trithemius believed would be taken from the monks. And the loss of that deeper understanding would not only be a loss for the monks in the short term, but also a loss that would extend to everyone the monks would go on to teach in the future.
The fact that Trithemius decided to have the treatise printed is a perfect illustration of what we would see moving forward with every new technological milestone. The benefits were obvious. In this case, the new technology would be able to get the word out to hundreds of readers in a relatively short time. Something that would have been impossible before its invention. But the cost of that advancement would be a reduction in a practice that produced a deeper level of knowledge, and perhaps a deeper level of human meaning.
And that is why I think the story of Trithemius is a great place to begin. It perfectly illustrates a tension that we will see throughout this book, both in the history of past technologies, and in what we are likely to lose in a world in which AI continues to progress.
When I say that we have spent five hundred years getting it wrong, I am not implying that nobody was able to identify risks and dangers of these technologies when they were in their early phase. Instead, I see a pattern in which we knew what the cost would be but we were either too enthralled with the gains, or we were too seduced by the ideas of more direct dangers that captured our imaginations in a way that produced urgency to solve them, while the quiet costs accumulated underneath.
These quiet costs include things like the loss of a deeper form of understanding, which is real but is harder to see, in the sense that it is not something being physically taken away, but rather something that doesn’t occur, which otherwise might have. We tend to have more urgency when the loss is something we have currently and stand to lose. With AI, we fear the jobs, which we currently have, being taken from us. It is harder to wrap one’s brain around the loss of understanding Trithemius was worried about than it is to imagine losing a job we already have.
Time and time again, technology has made a massive leap forward, and it does exactly what we hoped it would do, and its benefits are real. We do not have to downplay its positives in order to understand and accept its costs. The printing press was a perfect example of this duality. The railroads are another.
Coming 2026
Get launch updates