What the Printing Press Debate Can Teach Us About GenAI

Every argument you’re hearing against large language models today — stolen data, lost jobs, power concentrating in a few hands — was made against the printing press five centuries ago. Looking at how that played out tells us something about where we’re headed with AI.

In this video, I compare the ethical criticism of LLMs with the historical reaction to Gutenberg’s printing press, and argue that we’re at a similar inflection point: messy, empirical, and slow to resolve — but ultimately one that moves things forward.

Topics covered:

Why scribes lost their jobs when the printing press arrived — and what that parallels in software development today
How the printing press shifted power to whoever could afford one
The “we need to control what people learn” argument against literacy
How copyright law emerged messily, over decades, to regulate publishing
What Anthropic’s settlement with book authors signals about AI regulation
Predictions: smaller specialized models, on-device AI, and coming legislation on rights and liability for AI-generated content

The ethical concerns about AI are real and fair — they just won’t lead to a stop in the development of the technology, any more than they were with the printing press.