What the Printing Press Really Teaches Us About Innovation with Scott D. Anthony

You've outlined 4 key questions which generate some paradoxical answers, right? So you ask, who is it that innovates? Is it random? Is it accelerating? Is it always good? Can you walk us through perhaps one, one of your examples and answer these questions for us? And what are the responses that you, that you've come up with to these questions?

I think the printing press example in chapter 2 allows us to answer, I think, all 4 of the questions. We'll see how we do. But you know, the very short story of the printing press: 1434, Gutenberg moves to Strasbourg, not to create the printing press. 1437, he creates a venture to do something very different, to create mirrors that would capture the Holy Spirit during a planned pilgrimage. The pilgrimage gets called off because of an outbreak of the plague. Bad for the mirror venture, good for humanity, because ultimately the team with Gutenberg on it creates the printing press. So that, that's the beginning part of the story. So what does it teach us about those 4 questions? Who does it? I say it's a collectively individualistic activity. So Gutenberg, of course, is the hero in the story, but there's no story unless there's his partner who works with him, unless Konrad Sauspach brings the printing press, unless Johann Fust gives the funding, unless Nicolaus of Cusa provides the first commercial opportunity. There's a lot of people involved in it. That's important to remember. Is it predictable? One of the things that I observe consistently through the story is, yes, there are clear patterns. So why did Gutenberg come up with the printing press? Strasbourg was a great location. It was a trade route. There is a bell industry there, so people are engraving on the bells. It's a wine-growing region, so there are presses. The basic pattern— magic happens at intersections— that runs through all the stories. There's never a straight line to success, though, so you don't know exactly how it's going to work. But you certainly can look for those patterns. The 4th question gets really well illustrated by Gutenberg. Is it a universal good? There are, of course, a lot of good things that happen with the printing press. But one very persistent finding in my research is that disruption always casts a shadow. What was it for the printing press? Well, Nicholas of Cusa, the Catholic Church, is an early customer. Makes sense, right? They want to standardize the missals that you use for religious ceremonies. It takes 3 years to hand inscribe a Bible. They're super thrilled when they can do that faster. However, they're less thrilled when it also allows Martin Luther to spread his different views of religion a lot faster. These second-order effects sometimes lead people to say, what have I done? So you also have all sorts of things that happen because knowledge spreads, many of them good, some of them bad. The third thing about the pace of innovation doesn't fully get answered in the Gutenberg story, but I can make a connection. Not an overnight success. So the printing press in 1440, you've got the basic pieces there. The first Bible rolls out in 1454, 14 years later, and it's really 5 or 6 decades before you really feel the impact. So it's like a 70-year story. The timelines have compressed today, but it's not like things happen overnight. As one very simple example, ChatGPT introduces the first— or OpenAI introduces the first version of ChatGPT commercially in 2022. It quickly gets to 100 million consumers in the 56th year of artificial intelligence, as artificial intelligence research began in 1956 at a conference in Dartmouth College. So 70 years to have the full impact of the printing press, 56 years before we feel it deeply individually with artificial intelligence. It's not a massive acceleration, is it?