Aye, aye, aye!
All we hear these days is “AI!” Large Language Models. Image Generation. Computer Programming. Curing Cancer. Ruining the Economy. Displacing White Collar Workers. The END of the WORLD!!!
It is all the old fear of Frankenstein, the Golem, Colossus, SkyNet, or The Matrix. Or perhaps we finally get Isaac Asimov’s Positronic Brain with its wonderful Three Laws of Robotics.
We need a little more horse sense and a little less horse manure.
Like the ballyhoo at the Ten in One sideshow – All excitement. Precious little information.
What does “Artificial” really mean? What does “Intelligence” really mean? Those are interesting questions, and history will eventually answer them – good, bad, or raggedy.
Meanwhile, I suspect we are probably looking in the wrong direction.
The great change taking place before our eyes is not primarily about Artificial. Nor is it Intelligence.
This “revolution” is all about Access. Civilization has been working on that problem for thousands of years.
Writing itself is ancient. Five thousand years ago, people were carving symbols into stone or pressing them into clay tablets. Wonderful for permanence. Not so wonderful for portability. Eventually, papyrus and parchment arrived on the scene. The phrase, “It is written,” became almost synonymous with authority.
To hold many pages together, people rolled them into scrolls. But scrolls have an annoying characteristic. They are serial.
If the sentence you want is near the end, you begin at the beginning and unroll… and unroll… and unroll until you finally arrive where you desired.
If you are old enough to remember cassette tapes, you already understand serial access. “Hang on… almost there… no, too far… rewind… stop… forward just a little…”
The music was always there. Getting to it was the challenge.
Around the time of Jesus, one of history’s quiet revolutions appeared. Someone had the remarkably simple idea of fastening pages together along one edge.
The codex. We simply call it a book. Instead of unrolling thirty feet of parchment, you just opened to page 127.
Computer people have a name for this: Random Access.
The difference is like listening to a vinyl record rather than a cassette tape. With the record, you simply place the needle where you want it. The music hasn’t changed. Only your access to the music.
Perhaps the greatest, most consequential invention in human history is movable metal type printing. Rather than hand copy – at the rate of maybe a page a day – pages could be perfectly printed in a minute. What was once carved in stone, then written on papyrus, then bound in books, could now be shared far and wide. Knowledge was no longer merely preserved. Access became a broadly shared ability. Libraries solved the next problem. A room containing one hundred thousand books is still overwhelming if there is no way to find the one you need. So along came classification schemes, catalogs, the Dewey Decimal system. Finding information is as important as preserving it.
Imagine walking into an old record store, smelling the faint aroma of cardboard sleeves and vinyl. A thousand albums are there – not piled in a heap, but displayed in boxes where flipping through was a ritual and an adventure. The music hasn’t changed, only access to the music.
Computers changed writing and reading once again. Letters became bytes. Books became digital files. Copying was just data inside the machine. Distribution was on the internet – almost as fast as light, all around the world.
For music, the sounds became bits rather than grooves – packed into files just like any other file in the machine. In any machine. Information was no longer on a particular shelf in a particular library. It lived at an address.
Then came search. A perfect example of a search engine is the old-time jukebox. You no longer needed to know where the record was stored inside the cabinet. You simply pressed B-17, and hidden machinery found the record, placed it on the turntable, and played exactly the song you wanted.
Search engines did the same thing for information. One of the great struggles in the old days was finding a particular article in a magazine. As a college student, I would go to the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. On one occasion, I found three articles. One of them was in an issue that was missing. Another was on a page that was ripped out. And the third was in a periodical that the library did not carry. 0 for 3!
With computer search engines, generally known as “Google,” you only needed the right words. In a fraction of a second, dozens of links appeared – a menu of knowledge waiting to be explored.
All these developments changed one factor involved in acquiring information. They made it easier. Faster. Over a greater range of knowledge and space. But the next step, which is upon us now, brings a whole new paradigm to finding what you want to know.
At a piano bar, you go to the musician and say, “Can you play that song from that old movie?”
The piano player smiles. “You mean Try to Remember?”
“I’m trying to remember. That’s why I’m asking.”
“Okay… who sang it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Bing Crosby…No…”
“What was the movie about?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Can you hum it?”
You hum something that would embarrass a dying goose. The pianist smiles. “Moon River.”
“That’s it!”
Notice what happened.
The piano player does not know as many songs as the internet or even a jukebox contains. The difference is not the music, not the information. The difference is in the conversation. You didn’t need to know the title or the artist, or even exactly what you were looking for.
You only needed enough to begin the conversation.
That is the real revolution. The computer is no longer asking you to supply the correct search terms. Instead, it begins helping you discover what it is you were trying to ask in the first place.
That broad collection of technologies is usually gathered under the convenient label “Artificial Intelligence.” It is a useful marketing term, but not a particularly helpful description of what most of us are actually experiencing.
What we are experiencing today is not entirely new. It is another chapter in a very old story.
The scroll allowed cultures to preserve law, religion, and history beyond human memory.
The codex made comparison practical. A scholar could place one finger in Matthew and another in Isaiah. Study itself changed.
Printing democratized ownership of knowledge. It helped fuel the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, mass literacy, and eventually newspapers.
Libraries changed their purpose from merely preserving books to making them accessible to ordinary citizens.
Search engines changed research. We no longer memorized where information lived. We learned how to find it.
Conversational access… we do not yet know all of its consequences. History has not had time to write that chapter. But one lesson does seem clear. Every time human beings dramatically improve access to information, civilization changes.
That is why I think we are asking the wrong question. We keep asking whether Artificial Intelligence is truly intelligent.
Perhaps the more important question is what happens when information becomes conversational.
Unfortunately, another familiar pattern has appeared just as quickly.
Every great advance in access eventually attracts those who ask, “How do we make money from this?”
There is nothing new about that. Printing made publishing giants. Search engines empowered advertising empires. Today, conversational access is rapidly becoming another marketplace. Every remarkable advance in computation – from language models to image generation to scientific discovery – is gathered under the convenient brand name “AI,” and the first question too often becomes not “What can we learn?” but “What can we sell?”
Exploration gives way to exploitation. Exploitation gives rise to expectation. And expectation has a habit of inflating bubbles.
History suggests that some of those expectations will prove justified. Others will not. History also suggests that, long after the excitement fades and the speculators move on, the increase in access remains.
That is the real revolution.
And then something curious happened.
We came full circle.
Today, millions of people spend hours every week staring at a glowing screen, moving one finger upward…
again…
and again…
and again.
Scroll.
Scroll.
Scroll.
For two thousand years, civilization worked to escape the limitations of the scroll.
Now we carry one in our pockets.
The difference, of course, is that this scroll is written by an algorithm. And Lord help you if you happen to see something you want to remember tomorrow.
So it goes, in a world built upon attention – your attention, my attention. I suspect the endless scroll is simply an old habit draped over a remarkable new possibility.
Perhaps we’ve misunderstood those initials all along.
For most of us, AI is not primarily Artificial Intelligence.
It is Accessible Information.
