AI is the new Printing Press - Idan Beck
Idan Beck
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AI is the new Printing Press<br>A different take on what has become a trite comparison to previous step-changes in the history of technology and the dominion of humanity<br>Idan Beck<br>Jul 03, 2026
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It has been a while since I last sat down to do personal writing.<br>I was taking a shower today and had a neat idea sneak into my brain. With a semi-quiet day and an hour or two before my next obligation, I figured I would sit down and jot it out.<br>I should say up front that this is what this forum is for: these kinds of thoughts. For the more interesting blogs, research, and essays related to my work with Zerg, I will direct the reader to zergai.com, where we will soon be publishing a veritable flood of material we have been working on. I have made the mistake of mixing this channel with that one. No longer. We have a blog for those things.<br>So this will be less formed. It will still be run through my usual "Fake Idan" virtual editor, so I can promise the reader some degree of AI-enabled sheen, but my process is still basically:<br>Write out a borderline train-of-thought set of ideas
Go back and shape it into a coherent mass
Run it through my "Fake Idan" AI digital twin and argue with it until we get to some kind of first draft
Manually review and edit, then rinse and repeat with step 3 until it feels good to publish
Dear reader, I will first take a moment to share what has waylaid me from my usual shower-thought-driven musings and woolgathering.<br>Things (work, life, kids) have been crazy.<br>I am not going to be the eleventieth-million-and-first person to throw another shovelful onto the ever-growing pile of hype and praise about how amazing AI has been for me day to day. How much I can accomplish. How much more it feels like I have to do. But since I have already said those things, I will admit they are true. Zerg has been, as the kids like to say, "on a tear."<br>Every founder I know will always tell you that today is the best day ever, so I have learned to identify a tear by how much I am slipping up. When I am not slipping up, we are not on a tear. A tear is specifically defined by having so much going on that you have something of value to lose, and inevitably you will make some bad calls, lose sleep, chew glass, and so on just to attempt recovery (all the while things are actually going well probably).<br>Anyways. Enough preamble.<br>I want to talk about AI. Artificial intelligence, not to be mistaken for its other meaning: Actually Idan. More specifically, I want to talk about how I have come to view AI as the next step change in humanity's dominion over the natural sciences, technology, our planet, and potentially beyond.<br>Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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I will do so by comparing it to the printing press.<br>Not original, you say? What is anymore? Either way, do not worry. I have a twist.<br>Many have compared AI to the printing press, but the comparison is usually socioeconomic. Before the printing press, books were limited in number and not available to the average person. One reason was the means of production: books required manual labor and armies of scribes who replicated manuscripts by hand.<br>The printing press removed many of those constraints. To be precise, printing did not come from nowhere. Woodblock printing already existed broadly in Europe, and movable type had a much earlier history in Asia. But Gutenberg's printing press changed the economics by orders of magnitude in the environment where it clicked. Demand, technology, auxiliary conditions, and the Latin alphabet all combined to make book production and distribution possible at a scale that had not existed before. The economic-history version of this argument is laid out well in Jeremiah Dittmar's work on the printing press and European city growth.<br>Why China and Asia did not see the same kind of resulting techno-economic boom is also a fascinating (and controversial) subject, alas for another day.<br>This is usually the argument people make when they say LLMs are like the printing press. Software used to be a manual endeavor. You needed large groups of specialized people building systems one character at a time. Now AI makes that cheaper and faster. You can apply the same argument to accounting, writing, music, art, and almost any other domain.<br>I am not going to argue that point here. It is mostly true. But I think there is a more sober version of this argument, dare I say a more responsible way to think about it, one that does not sound like "AI is coming for us" any more than the internal combustion engine, electricity, or any other technological step change did.<br>AI and LLMs, really deep learning, allow us to do for intelligence and creativity what aerodynamics did for flight. Planes are not birds. But the important part is not birdness. It is the physics of lift. As NASA's basic aerodynamics guide puts it, lift is an...