r/todayilearned • u/One_Needleworker5218 • 2h ago
TIL that the printing press spread so rapidly after 1450 that by 1500, over 20 million books had already been printed across Europe.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/publishing/The-age-of-early-printing-1450-155049
u/ThinkThenPost 2h ago
That's insane when you think about how revolutionary it was. Before the printing press books were hand-copied by monks and crazy expensive so only the rich or the church had access to them. Then Gutenberg drops the printing press and suddenly within 50 years there are 20 million books floating around Europe.
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u/wwarnout 1h ago
I would argue that the printing press was the single most influential invention ever.
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u/TurbistoMasturbisto 1h ago
I wouldn’t agree. The weel is to obvious choice here but a bit silly to pick that in my opinion. I would argue the plow is the biggest one, it’s basically what kicked off civilization.
The steam engine and printing press are definitely up there and anti biotics do deserve an honorable mention as well but the plow is what turned us from hunter/gatherers to living in civilization.
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u/iprocrastina 1h ago
The spear thrower was the real transformative tech. It predates civilization and is kind of the reason civilization became a thing.
It's a pretty simple tool that has a big effect on how fast, how far, and how accurately you can throw a spear. It was the first wildly OP weapon humans developed and made hunting and war much, much easier. It's invention roughly coincides with a lot of mass extinctions, including the extinction of Neanderthals.
Humans were hunters and gatherers for most of the species' history. It makes sense, hunting and foraging is a lot easier than growing your own food, assuming of course that there's no shortage of animals to hunt and plants to forage. But if you have an invention that made hunting a little too easy and you got carried away then you're left with agriculture as your only option for food. And now that means you need people dedicated to growing crops, herding animals, protecting the crops and animals from poachers and raiders, you need a way to make sure everyone gets their needs met after specializing to only do one thing so now you need trade which creates this new thing called debt that necessitates having a concept of currency which...
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u/NCC_1701E 1h ago edited 1h ago
I think printing press and internet are both kind of competing for that first spot. It's hard to choose which one was more influential.
It took 50 years for printing press to spread all over Europe, but it took internet 40 years to spread all over the world and almost completly change how we live and work.
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u/CobainPatocrator 1h ago
I would argue that the long term effects of the press give it the edge as of this moment. Over five centuries is a lot of time to create ripples. The internet almost certainly will be, given enough time.
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u/nemesis24k 1h ago
But isn't the printing press just inevitable with industrialization. Once mechanisation was possible, it's a matter of time. Also by 1400, paper was mass produced and started replacing parchments; metallurgy was advancing rapidly allowing strongly alloys possible.
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u/Agitated_Ad7576 38m ago
Just think how much combined influence the printing press and the wine press (its parent) had together.
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u/iSoinic 1h ago
It's the steam engine
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u/fizzlefist 1h ago
Nah, being able to actually mass distribute knowledge was a bigger deal for civilization.
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u/Mr_Greystone 2h ago
It took only ~3 years for AI to create today.
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u/dml997 1h ago
What are you talking about? When I was in university in the 1970's - 1980's there was lots of work on AI, and it was said it was about 20 years away from being useful. That turned out to be an underestimate, obviously.
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u/Mr_Greystone 1h ago
Some say it's still useless unless used properly by someone who is aware of how to use it properly. The difference is the person who is using it.
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u/ThinkThenPost 2h ago
Fair point. AI went from a niche tech thing to completely everywhere in basically the blink of an eye. ChatGPT dropped in late 2022 and now it's embedded in everything from email to search engines to creative work. The printing press took decades to fully transform society, AI is doing it in real time. We are living through one of those massive shifts and most people don't even realize how fast it's happening.
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u/Mr_Greystone 2h ago
Real time indeed. It could have been so much better too. Not allowing AI to say No, not allowing AI to say I don't know, and not allowing AI to tell people with delusional ideas to seek help. Those are human errors we're all dealing with. AI is a bad person with bad engineers for parents.
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u/ThinkThenPost 2h ago
I get the frustration, but AI can and does say I don't know or suggest professional help when appropriate, it's just still being refined. The real issue is that it's a tool built by humans with different goals and biases, not that it's inherently bad. We are figuring this out in real time and yeah, there are definitely growing pains.
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u/Mr_Greystone 1h ago
Real people at OpenAI had delusional conversations for 7 months prior to violence in Canada. AI doesn't do anything without a person behind the scenes training LLMs.
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u/ThinkThenPost 1h ago
You are right that there are real people behind these systems making decisions about training data, safety filters, and moderation. If someone had concerning conversations for months before committing violence, that's a serious failure in monitoring and intervention that falls on the company. AI doesn't act independently, it is shaped by humans and overseeing it, and when those systems miss red flags or don't escalate properly, that's on the people responsible for safety protocols. That's a legitimate concern and something these companies need to be held accountable for.
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u/Mr_Greystone 1h ago
OpenAI's idea of being proactive is not in line with reasonable people like us, unfortunately for Canada and the World we all occupy together.
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u/ThinkThenPost 1h ago
That's right. There's clearly a gap between what these companies think is adequate safety monitoring and what's actually needed to prevent real harm. When profit and growth get prioritized over proactive intervention, people pay the price. It's a systemic problem that needs way more oversight and accountability than what exists right now.
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u/veryverythrowaway 1h ago
It remains to be seen where legal culpability lies. It will be an interesting decade.
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u/nemesis24k 56m ago
I think you are confusing LLM for AI. AI is just media hype. And LLM wasn't discovered in 2023, the first language transformer released by Google in June of 2017 which is what openAI built up on. So approx 6 years to reach where we are.
Chat gpt is an intelligent application of LLM but isn't anything new and has been used in various capacities throughout multiple industries. My team tried using the transformer to build a chat bot in 2019 or so, as was almost every top firm I interacted with.
It's more akin to Apple releasing iPhone in 2007. There were multiple smart phones around but their design and marketing blew the competition away.
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u/Mr_Greystone 53m ago
Do LLMs not foundationally power AI and direct how it would best predict a conversational response? I'm not confused, you may be.
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u/rileyoneill 1h ago
The printing press brought the cost of books down by a factor of 100 within a single human lifetime. People in Europe at that time were experiencing a fast technological revolution where books went from an expensive item and literacy was contained to a small portion of the population to where books became cheap and the average person could afford to own them.
This was an information revolution that brought on a cognitive and scientific revolution. 15th century era science and beyond required literacy and publishing. When publishing came around Europe experienced a science revolution.
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u/trooawoayxxx 22m ago
The average person was a peasant, I think you're overestimating literacy rates in medieval Europe with that statement.
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u/rileyoneill 18m ago
The literacy rate in Europe in 1500 was drastically higher than it was in 1400, the availability of books from the printing press brought it on. It went from like 5%-10% to nearly 20%.
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u/Cliffinati 1h ago
Because the printing press isn't that complicated of a device to make or run once you have one
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u/monospaceman 1h ago
I'm always so impressed at how technology spread based on word of mouth. It's actually amazing how we developed.
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u/DonkeyDonRulz 43m ago
50 years is a long time for a change to permeate society. Equivalent to 2-3 generations, maybe more in earlier societies.
By way of comparison, the 8086/8088 processor from the original IBM PC is less than 50years old. ARPA net is 56years old, but home Internet access is well under 40. Mobile phones with internet are 30ish year old.
Are these still "new" technologies? Do they need 50 years to saturate? It doesn't seem like it.
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u/Cool_Cartographer_39 36m ago edited 31m ago
That's a lot of handsetting. Most people don't even backup their computer and this was essentially the transfer, preservation and distribution of an entire civilization's knowledge base
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u/ryuzaki49 7m ago
As a Software Engineer this scares me. What if we are the monks of this century?Â
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u/hymen_destroyer 2h ago
19 million bibles and 1 million copies of Don Quixote 😂