All you've done is explain why the printing press was so important and necessary in order to break down previous unwarranted power structures. I have a similar hope for AGI. The alternative is that the incompant power structure instead benefits from AGI and uses it for oppression, which would mean it's not comparable to the printing press as such.

What the printing press did was rapidly increase the amount, type, range and speed of information spread. That was a qualitative difference. The Church did not build its empire on restricting that, because before printing press, it was not even possible (or conceivable).

My overall point wrt. inventions is this: yes, it may end up turning for the best. But at the time the invention of this magnitude appears and spreads, a) no one can tell how it'll pan out, and b) they get all the immediate, bloody downsides of disrupting the social order.

Masses were often held in Latin, printed material was typically written in Latin and Greek, and access to translated texts was frequently prohibited or admonished. They tried hard to silence those like Wycliffe who made the Bible more readily available to the masses, and he was posthumously denounced as a heretic by the Church. They absolutely wielded information as a tool of oppression.

This is not a hill to die on, the historical facts are clear despite the efforts of the Church.

> What the printing press did was rapidly increase the amount, type, range and speed of information spread

Sure, but that's not the only thing it did.

Consider that at the time the printing press was first invented, books were by their nature often assumed to be true, or high quality, because it took an institutional amount of effort (usually on the part of a monastery, university, local government, etc.) to produce one. Bible translations were produced, but they were understood to be "correctly translated". This was important because if the Church was going to have priests go around preaching to people, they needed to be sure they were doing so correctly -- a mistranslated verse could lead to mistranslated doctrines &c, and while a modern atheist might not care too much ("that's just one interpretation") at the time the understanding was that deviations in opinion could lead to conflict. Ultimately they were right: the European Wars of Religion lead to millions of deaths, including almost 1/3 the population of Germany. That's on the same scale as the Black Death!

And again, translations did exist before the Reformation: Even ignoring that the Latin Bible (the Vulgate) was itself a translation of the original Hebrew & Koine Greek., the first _Catholic French_ translation was published in 1550, and there was never a question of whether to persecute the authors. You might say, but that was because of the Reformation -- then consider the Alfonsine Bible, composed in 1280 under the supervision a Catholic King and the master of a Catholic holy order. Well before then there were partial translations too: the Wessex Gospels (Old English) were translated in 990, and to quote Victoria Thompson "although the Church reserved Latin for the most sacred liturgical moments almost every other religious text was available in English by the eleventh century". That's five hundred years before the Reformation. So the longest period you can get where the Church was not actively translating texts was c. 400 - c. 900, a period you probably know as the "Dark Ages" specifically thanks to the fact that literary sources of all kinds were scarce, in no small part because the resources to compose large texts simply weren't there. Especially when you consider that those who could read and write generally knew how to read and write Latin -- vernacular literacy only became important later, with the increase in the number of e.g. merchants and scribes -- such translations held little value during that period.

So fast forward to Wycliffe. Clearly, the Church did not have anything against translations of the Bible per se. What they disagreed with in Wycliffe's translation were the decisions made in translation. And as more of these "unapproved Bibles" began circulating around, they decided that the only way to curtail their spread was to ban all vernacular books specifically within the Kingdom of England, because that's where the problem (as they saw it) was. And it wasn't just translations -- improperly copied Latin copies were burned too.

Think about today, with the crisis around fake videos. On one hand you could that they distort the truth, that they promote false narratives, etc. You could try to fine or imprison people that go around publishing fake videos of e.g. politicians saying things they never said, or of shootings/disasters that never took place, to try and cause chaos. Yet who's to say that in a few hundred years someone -- living in a world that has since adjusted to a freer flow of information, one with fewer ways to tell whether something is true or not -- won't say "deepfakes &c are a form of expression, and governments shouldn't be trying to stop them just because they disagree with existing narratives"?

Of course we today see book burning as some supreme evil. But when you're talking about the stability of nations and whole societies, can you really say "how dare they even try"? If there were some technology that made it impossible for governments to differentiate between citizens, which made it possible for a criminal to imitate any person, anywhere, would you really oppose the government's attempts at trying to stop it from propagating?

> The alternative is that the incompant power structure instead benefits from AGI

Also, tangentially related, in what way is the current power structure not slated to benefit from AGI? That's why OpenAI and company are getting literally all of the money the collected hyperscaler club can throw at them to make it. That's why it's worth however-many-billions it's up to by now.

As for “breaking” Christianity: Christianity has been one schism after another for 2000 years: a schism from a schism from a schism. Power plays all the way down to Magog.

Socrates complained about how writing and the big boom in using the new Greek alphabet was ruining civilization and true learning.

And on and on it goes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War

Give a ruler and ruling class a new weapon and off they go killing and destroying more “efficiently”.

Before the Reformation there had only been one schism (Eastern Roman Empire - Orthodox; Western Roman Empire - Catholic).

The Reformation was the time where fragmentation of Christianity really exploded

Religious schisms happened before the printing press, too. There was the Great Schism in 1054 in Christianity, for example.

No, it wasn't. Wikipedia lists[0] over two dozen schisms that happened prior to Reformation. However, the capital R reformation was the big one, and the major reason it worked - why Luther succeeded where Hus failed a century earlier - was because of the printing press. It was print that allowed for Luther's treatises to rapidly spread among general population (Wikipedia cites some interesting claims here[1]), and across Europe. In today's terms, printing press is what allowed Reformation to get viral. This new technology is what made the revolution spread too fast for the Church to suppress it with methods that worked before.

Of course, the Church survived, adapted, and embraced the printing press for its own goals too, like everyone else. But the adaptation period was a bloody one for Europe.

And I only covered the religious aspects of the printing press's impact. There are similar stories to draw on more secular front, too. In fact, another general change printing introduced is to get regular folks more informed and involved in politics of their regions. That's a change for the better overall, too, but initially, it injected a lot of energy into socio-political systems that weren't used to it, leading to instability and more bloodshed before people got used to it and politics found a new balance.

> existing power struggles, rivalries, discontent, etc.

Those always exist, and stay in some form of equilibrium. Technology doesn't cause them - but what it does is disturb the old equilibrium, forcing society to find a new one, and this process historically often got violent.

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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schism_in_Christianity#Lists_o...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation#Spread - see e.g. footnote 28: "According to an econometric analysis by the economist Jared Rubin, "the mere presence of a printing press prior to 1500 increased the probability that a city would become Protestant in 1530 by 52.1 percentage points, Protestant in 1560 by 43.6 percentage points, and Protestant in 1600 by 28.7 percentage points."

Yes, technology impacts social constructs and relationships but I think there is a tendency to overindex its effects (humans acting opportunistically vs technological change alone) as it in a way portrays humans and their interactions as more stable and deliberate (ie., the bad stuff wasn't humans but rather "caused" by technology).

Yes, ants could technically conspire to sneak up to you while you sleep and bite you all at once to kill you, so do you go out to eradicate all ants?

Why would it invest resources to relocate and protect itself when it could mitigate the threat directly? Or, why wouldn't it do both, by using our resources to relocate itself?

In the famous words of 'Eliezer, that best sum up the "orthogonality thesis": The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.

> ants could technically conspire to sneak up to you while you sleep and bite you all at once to kill you, so do you go out to eradicate all ants?

Ants are always a great case study.

No, of course not. But if, one morning, you'll find ants in your kitchen, walking over your food, I don't imagine you'll gently collect them all and release in the nearby park. Most people would just stomp them out and call it a day. And, should the ants set up an anthill in your backyard and mount regular invasions of your kitchen, I imagine you'd eventually get pissed of and destroy the anthill.

And I'm not talking about some monstrous fire ants like the ones that chew up electronics in the US, or some worse hell-spawn from Australia that might actually kill you. Just the regular tiny black ants.

Moreover, people don't give a second thought to anthills when they're developing land. It stands where the road will go? It gets paved over. It sticks out where children will play? It gets removed.

The value of atoms - or even the value of raw materials made of atoms is hopefully less than the value of information embodied in complex living things that have processed information from the ecosystem over millions of years via natural selection. Contingent complexity has inherent value.

I think there's a claim to be made that AI is just as likely to value us (and complex life in general) as it is to see as a handy blob of hydrocarbons. This claim is at least as plausible as the original claim.

It's all fun and games until two people or groups contest the same limited resources; then there's sword and fire o'clock.

Most nations on earth are not at war with each other.

My observation is that most people are pretty nice, and the assholes are rare outliers. I don't think we would survive as a species if it was the other way 'round.

My nation of birth famously took over a quarter of the planet.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move… but only by the people who actually kicked my forebears out — even my parents (1939/1943) who saw the winds of change and end of empire, were convinced The Empire had done the world a favour.

> My observation is that most people are pretty nice, and the assholes are rare outliers. I don't think we would survive as a species if it was the other way 'round.

In-group/out-group. We domesticated ourselves, and I agree we would not have become so dominant a species if we had not. But I have heard it said that psychopaths are to everyone what normal people are to the out-group. That's the kind of thing that allowed the 9/11 attackers to do what they did, or the people of the US military to respond the way they did. It's how the invasion of Vietnam happened, it's how the Irish Potato Famine happened despite Ireland exporting food at the time, it's the slave owners who quoted the bible to justify what they did, and it's the people who want to outlaw (at least) one of your previous employers.

Conflict doesn't always mean "war".

Bees might be a better analogy since they produce something that humans can use.

And yet they're endangered, and we already figured out how to do pollination, so we know we can survive without them - it's just going to be a huge pain. Some famines may follow, but likely not enough to endanger civilization as a whole.

Thus even with this analogy, if humans end up being an annoying supply chain dependency to an AI, the AI might eventually work out an alternative supply chain, at which point we're back to being just an annoyance.

I'm not confident enough to rely on that: most people in the west have never encountered a famine, only much milder things like the price of one or two staples being high — eggs currently — never all of them at once.

What will we do to ourselves if we face a famine? Will we go to war (or exterminate the local "undesirables") like the old days?

How fragile are we now, compared to the last time that happened? How much has specialisation meant that the elimination of certain minorities will just break everything? "Furries run the internet", as the memes say. What other sectors are over-represented by a small minority?

...for now. Given sufficient advances in robotics, why would you expect that to continue?

Well you see, everyone knows The Terminator and The Matrix and Frankenstein and The Golem of Prague and Rossum's Universal Robots.

All of which share a theme: the sinful hubris of playing god and trying to create life will inevitably lead to us being struck down by the very being we created.

In parallel, all the members of our educated classes have received philosophy education saying "utilitarianism says it's good to reduce total human suffering, but technically if you eliminated all humans there would be no suffering any more, ha ha obviously that's a reductio ad absurdum to show a weakness of utilitarianism please don't explode the world"

And so in the Western cultural tradition, and especially among the sort of people who call themselves futurists Arnold Schwarzenegger firing a minigun is the defining image of AI.

The Matrix had humanity under control, but the machines had no desire to eliminate humanity, the machines just wanted to live — humans kept on fighting the machines even when the machines gave humanity an experiential paradise to live in.

Frankenstein is harder because of how the book differs from the films. Your point it is valid because it is about the cultural aspects and I expect more have seen one of the films than to have read/listened to the book — but in the book, Adam was described as beautiful in every regard save for his eyes, he was a sensitive, emotional vegetarian, and he only learned anger after being consistently shown hatred and violence by absolutely everyone he ever met except that one who was blind.

And even when we didn't mean to -- how many species have we pushed to the brink just because we wanted to build cities where they happened to live? What happens when some AI wants to use your groundwater for its cooling system? It wouldn't be personal, but you'd starve to death regardless.

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit”

Did Gutenberg expect his invention would, 150 years later, set the whole Europe ablaze, and ultimately break the hold the Church had over people? Did he expect it to be a key component leading to accumulation of knowledge that, 400 years later, will finally make technological progress visibly exponential? On that note, did Watt realize he's about to kick-start the exponent that people will ride all the way to the actual Moon less than 200 years later? Or did Goddard, Oberth and Tsiolkovsky realize that their work on rocketry will be critical in establishing world peace within a century, and that the way this peace will be established is through a Mexican standoff between major world powers, except with rocket-propelled city-busting bombs instead of guns?

So basically we are a bit screwed in our current timeline. We are at the cusp of a post-scarcity society, possibly reach AGI within our lifetimes and possibly even become a space faring civilization. However, it is highly likely that we are going to pay the pound of flesh and only subsequent generations - perhaps yet unborn - will be the ones who will be truly better off.

I suppose it's not all doom and gloom, we can draw stoic comfort from the fact that people in the near future will have an incredibly exciting era full of discovery and wonder ahead of them!