A 400 Year Old Moral Panic Over New Technology

I have a terrible habit of scrolling YouTube looking for interesting and educational videos. I spend a lot of time in the scrolling part and I don’t have a good track record of picking out the useful stuff either. But every now and again I come across a nugget.

For example yesterday I was lured into a video that teased me with a mental technique that will help learn anything or solve any problem. And the kicker was that it was over 400 years old. What was this thing that I have somehow missed out on?

It turned out to be the suggestion that if you want to work on learning or solving something, you should write an essay about it. The essay form was devised and popularised by Montaigne around 400 years ago. Well I sort of knew all that, but it was an interesting take on it. I think I actually worked out that writing out my thoughts on something was a useful thing to do when confronted with something I discovered myself. But it is certainly good advice and I have done it a lot.

But I hadn’t thought of it as an innovation. But in Montaigne’s time it would not have been remotely obvious. The leisure time to sit down and put pen to paper would have been a rare enough thing. And the avialability of pens and paper would have been limited by their relative cost. Even when I was young, writing paper wasn’t that easy to come by. I can remember cutting the blank front and end pages from books to have something to write on.

So I dare say to his contempories Montaigne’s essays must have had the same impact that AI does today. Not only were people translating the Bible and printing copies of it for anyone to read, not only was paper being used instead of gold in transactions, now people were transmitting their very thoughts to paper. You could now access someone’s brain anywhere in the world and long after they were dead. Were was it all going to end?

I think it is worth keeping a bit of perspective at a time when the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence are treated with so much hyperbole. Essays didn’t change the world that much. Efficient autocorrect won’t either.