What is the most important invention in human history?
Some will argue it was the wheel, others fire, while others will say the printing press or maybe even the Internet. For me, it is reading and writing. That is not to say that the others were not important.
Fire and the wheel have definitely had a big impact on our lives and made them easier. But reading and writing is different. It enables one human to pass information and knowledge to another through space and time. Until that point, we were limited to what others told us.
And without writing, we would have no printing press or Internet, or even generative AI. They build on and extend the technology of writing. They would never have existed without a written language.
Writing broke a hard biological limit
Firstly, as I discussed in why reading is a technology, we have a limited capacity in our working memory of seven items, plus or minus two. Reading and writing allowed us to push past that limit.
It also let us pass information and knowledge to each other, not just through space but through time.
Before writing, we learnt from others by watching what they did and listening to what they said. Even today, that is still one of the most effective ways to learn, especially for tacit knowledge, which is the things we learn by actually doing them.
Explicit knowledge is knowledge that can be easily communicated through language: not just the spoken word of a teacher, which you would likely forget, but the written word. I’m hoping that this blog post will be a form of explicit knowledge for you.
Writing is durable, allowing us to spread ideas and thoughts to others through both space and time. It means past ideas can be revisited again and again over time, and not just by the individual who thought of them, but by others, including those who hadn’t even been born when the author wrote down the original idea. We can write down an idea so that we, or others, can come back to it later and consider it further before making improvements to the original. It could even act as a trigger for a better idea.
This capturing and sharing of information and knowledge is what the modern world is built upon. An example is Einstein’s theory of general relativity, published in 1915, which sought to extend Newton’s law of universal gravitation, published in 1687, some 228 years earlier.
Einstein would not have come up with his theory of general relativity if he hadn’t been able to read Newton’s ideas, which the technology of writing had carried to him across space and time.
Our non-physical, abstract technologies
Our non-physical, abstract technologies and ideas all run on the operating system we created with the technology of reading and writing.
- Our laws are written so that they can be referred to by a judge or lawyer
- Money: the amount of money in my bank account is in writing, and the value of a note is written on it
- Scientific and mathematical theories are written down and shared with others
By writing it down, we preserve this knowledge. As long as someone can read it, the information can be accessed when needed.
What has changed since writing was first invented is the technology around it, and some of those inventions have had a massive impact on the speed and cost of transferring information and knowledge. But the information being transferred was always in the form of writing.
Take the printing press. Its invention made it easier to produce copies of books; until that point, every copy of a book had to be written by hand. The printing press allowed a machine to copy the works, reducing the cost of books significantly. In fact, it seems to have led to concerns about information overload, a concern that would rear its head again.
The Internet hasn’t just made it easier to copy written content, now stored in digital formats; it has also made it easier to distribute. As I mentioned in my previous post in this series, literally as soon as I publish this post, someone anywhere in the world can read it, at very little or no cost at all.
Training large language models
Large language models such as Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini are trained on massive datasets made up of human writing: the product of human knowledge, from the great literary works like Shakespeare’s, to the work of our great philosophers, to scientific theories such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, and who knows, maybe even this blog post.
What many of us, including myself, consider to be our most cutting-edge technology learns by using the technology of writing, invented some 5,500 years ago.
Writing isn’t an important invention among many. It is the very foundation that modern technology, and the world it has enabled us to build, is built on.
This post is triumphalist, as I think it is worth celebrating what writing has allowed us to do. But as with all things, it came at a cost, and these costs may even give us an insight into what impact AI will have on us.
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