BUSINESS REFLECTION: Crossed Wires: Multiple Gutenberg moments and the defining question of our age

I recently heard it said that we are living through a moment of “20 Gutenberg presses”. It came from the entrepreneur and technology podcaster Salim Ismail. His narrative is that the Gutenberg press was the most transformative piece of technology ever built, one that completely rearranged civilisation like none other before it. Then he states the obvious – just look at what is happening across every foundational pillar of knowledge now. It’s presses and presses and presses as far as the eye can see.

But today’s popular commentary insists on treating LLMs as our era’s sole Gutenberg moment – a singular technological lightning bolt destined to rewrite humanity’s future. That narrative obscures what is really under way. Now we have, quite suddenly, multiple simultaneous and very different Gutenberg presses – all firing at once, all accelerating one another, all lowering the costs of manipulating both digital and physical reality, and all expanding human knowledge. AI is only one.

Before we get to that, let’s pay our respects to the impact of the original Gutenberg press. In about 1450, a struggling German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg stitched together a wine press, a novel alloy of lead, tin and antimony, an oil-based ink and a hand mould for casting type into a single system. By 1500, half a century after the first Gutenberg Bible was printed, presses had appeared in some 250 to 280 European towns and had turned out perhaps 20 million volumes for a continent of around 70 million people.

Over the following century output rose roughly tenfold, to somewhere between 150 and 200 million copies. The press catalysed the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the newspaper, the nation-state and more than a century of exceptionally nasty religious wars. It remains the gold standard of knowledge revolutions. (Johannes Gutenberg did not actually invent printing – the Chinese and Koreans had been at it for centuries. What he built was an integrated printing system, and systems are what change the world.)

Because I write frequently about new technologies, I decided to do my own (admittedly unscientific) “new” Gutenberg press count. Here they are:

Look beyond AI and you will find revolutions occurring simultaneously in synthetic biology, gene editing, programmable medicine, robotics, autonomous drones, photonics, semiconductors, quantum computing, neuroscience, advanced materials, additive manufacturing, sensors, digital twinning, energy generation and storage, nuclear technology, space technology, blockchain and autonomous scientific laboratories (with AI lending a hand to some, but not all, of these).

I make that 19 modern-age Gutenberg presses, allowing for some generous bundling to avoid turning this into a taxonomy argument. Ismail recently raised his number to 25. Stanford’s Emerging Technology Review settles on 10 broad domains; McKinsey currently tracks 14 major technology trends. The interesting fact is not the score. It is that so many of these curves are bending upwards, even exponentially upwards, and talking to each other, courtesy the stochastic lingua franca of AI.

What it all means

I had intended to summarise each of these 19 new presses with an explanatory paragraph and a shiny example, but to do so within the boundaries of polite column length would surely give short shrift to all. Let’s rather consider the more important story of what the simultaneous arrival of all these disparate technologies really means.

Firstly, there is the matter of speed. The original Gutenberg press had decades to spread across Europe and centuries to take root in different disciplines. Although the press was the catalyst for the darker consequences of propaganda and wars and religious strife, institutions also had the time to consider its impact, to govern its content and to control its distribution. 

There is no such luxury now. The time it takes for new applications based on these emerging technologies to arrive has shrunk from centuries to years, months and, in some cases, days. There is little chance of being able to re-engineer the time-consuming processes of regulation, politics and (perhaps most importantly) the reasoned deliberation of citizens to match the speed of this ongoing innovation. (The current often-unreasoned fury around AI data centres is a perfect example of the consequences of speed).

The second matter is that the original Gutenberg press copied what the scribes already knew, starting with the Bible. This time it’s different – many of these technologies are creating either new knowledge directly, or its raw material in the form of data. A constellation of imaging satellites, a swarm of sensor-laden drones and an autonomous lab are all instruments that generate new data at a scale no previous generation could have imagined.

The third matter is the most important. It is that each press gets to read the books printed by the others, creating a knowledge-amplifying effect.

Consider an AI that assists in designing new materials. Those materials can make better batteries and semiconductors. Better semiconductors can help train better AI. Better AI with better batteries can better control and power robots. Robots can automate laboratories. Automated laboratories will generate new biological and chemical data. AI will learn from those data and propose the next experiment – in gene engineering, for instance, which in turn will produce enormous datasets that machine learning can interrogate.

This is a virtuous circle on steroids, amplifying itself in ever-widening loops.

Gutenberg’s press did not come with a manual for the Reformation. The 19 presses of our moment will not come with a manual for what happens when energy, biology, computation, materials and their peers all shift at once. The knowledge is already spreading faster than our ability to digest it, to codify it, to taxonomise it and to teach it good manners.

The original press kept its form essentially unchanged for 350 years. These presses will not. They will merge, accelerate and recombine in ways we cannot yet forecast. The only thing we can say with confidence is that the age of one press is over. We are living in the age of many – an entire constellation of foundational technologies breaking their historic constraints at the exact same moment.

Which means what? That we should pause until we do learn what it all means? Or muddle on through while whacking troublesome moles along the way, the way we have always done with previous technologies? 

That is the open question of our age. DM

Steven Boykey Sidley is a visiting professor at the Centre for Graduate Studies at Rhodes University, a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large at Daily Maverick, where he writes the weekly Crossed Wires column. His new book, Checkmate: How Shoprite Checkers Rewrote the Rules and Won is published by Jonathan Ball.