The 600-year curve: Why your "AI anxiety" is actually history repeating itself.
I want you to look at the graph for a second. Really look at it. Look hard.
We often talk about “Exponential Growth” as a modern tech buzzword, but this curve started in a small goldsmith’s shop in Mainz, Germany, in 1440.
When Johannes Gutenberg combined a wine press with movable metal type, he didn’t just invent a machine. He broke the first great bottleneck of human civilisation: the production of information.
The scribe vs. the machine
Before this curve began, if you wanted to share a breakthrough in medicine or a new philosophical idea, you were limited by the speed of a human hand. A scribe could take a year to copy a single Bible.
Then came the “Gutenberg Moment” As the table below shows, the jump wasn’t just significant—it was a total discontinuity in human history.
The literacy incentive: power via accessibility
We often credit the printing press with “creating” literacy. In truth, it created the value for literacy.
When a single book cost a year’s wages, learning to read was a useless skill for the masses. But when the press caused prices to collapse and printers began publishing in local vernaculars rather than just Latin, the incentive changed. Reading wasn’t just for the clergy anymore; it became the key to trade, social mobility, and power.
We didn’t just get more books; we got more people capable of engaging with them.
The second bottleneck: generation
For 500 years, the printing press allowed us to distribute ideas instantly. But generating those ideas—writing the code, drafting the brief, synthesising the data—remained a manual, “hand-copied” process of the mind.
AI is the “printing press” for the labour of the brain.
We are currently transitioning from compositional literacy (the ability to write) to architectural literacy (the ability to curate, verify, and direct).
Why this is scintillating (and scary)
If you feel like the world is spinning too fast, remember that the people of the 16th century felt the exact same “information shock.”
- They had “fake news”: The 1500s were flooded with sensationalist pamphlets that led to massive social unrest (the Sea Monster of Rome which appeared in various broadsides across Europe in 1496 and throughout the 1500s)
- They had job displacement: Professional scribes saw their entire industry vanish in a generation (in 1450, nearly 100% of the estimated 50,000 books in Europe were hand-copied by scribes. By 1500, only fifty years later, scribes accounted for less than 2% of the total output, as the number of printed books surged to approximately 10 million)
- They had a truth crisis: When anyone could print, who was the expert? (The Malleus Maleficarum was the 16th-century equivalent of an algorithmic bias—it took a fringe, incorrect ideology and used a high-speed distribution network to scale it until it was accepted as objective reality. When the cost of production drops, the cost of verifying the truth must rise proportionally)
But on the other side of that chaos was the enlightenment. The Scientific Revolution happened because scientists could finally “build” on each other’s work instead of starting from scratch every time.
The 2026 pivot
Look at the end of that graph. That line isn’t just a count of “books”—it represents the total sum of human output.
We are moving into an era where the “scribe work” of the 21st century (the boilerplate emails, the basic code, the data entry) is being automated. This leaves us with a singular, daunting, and scintillating task: To be the authors of what comes next.
The printing press didn’t replace the thinker; it gave the thinker a megaphone. AI isn’t here to replace your mind; it’s here to scale your intent.
The press is running. What are you going to say?
footnote: The 170 billion figure for 2026 is a modern projection that accounts for the transition from physical to digital. While the number of unique book titles ever published is estimated by Google Books to be around 130 to 150 million, the number of copies in circulation—especially when including e-books and digital versions—is estimated in the hundreds of billions.