From the printing press to LLMs: we're now mainlining synthetic linguistic entities
StewartalsopIII · x · 2026-10-08
The author reflects on AI through media history: before the 1200s the West had only two Aristotle books and an information diet of the Bible and Boethius; the printing press took a century to spread before Luther went viral and changed everything.
Key points:
- People discount media as technology because it's meta — it changes perception and identity itself
- Before 2022 almost nobody had genuinely conversed with a language bot; now people are "mainlining synthetic linguistic entities"
- LLMs can help us grasp exactly what was revolutionary about Aristotle — a comparison invisible to someone from 1,000 years ago
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