March 8, 2023
Was Gutenberg’s Printing Press Technology Stolen?
Stories circulated in Gutenberg’s lifetime of attempts to steal his invention while he was working on it. Can we know if they're true?
A reader has sent me an email with the note: “Be reassured: AI will replace Kissinger but never Philologos.” With it came a link to an article about ChatGPT published in the February 24 Wall Street Journal by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher. There they wrote:
A new technology bids to transform the human cognitive process as it has not been shaken up since the invention of printing. The technology that printed the Gutenberg Bible in 1455 made abstract human thought communicable generally and rapidly. But new technology today reverses that process. Whereas the printing press caused a profusion of modern human thought, the new technology achieves its distillation and elaboration.
It’s a comfort to know that AI will not take away my job. But let’s put aside ChatGPT and concentrate on “the invention that . . . made abstract human thought communicable generally and rapidly”—which, you may recall, figured several weeks ago in these pages in a column titled, “Did a 15th-Century Jew Beat Gutenberg to the Printing Press?”