I visited Egypt over the summer. We spent a few days in Cairo with our friend who was getting married. Then we flew to Aswan to marvel at the ruins of ancient Egypt while cruising along the Nile.

My biggest takeaway from the trip was neither the grandeur of the pyramids in Giza, the impressive Kom Ombo Temple¹, nor the energy of New Cairo City. No. It was the stories that survived the centuries.

The ancient Egyptians left meticulous records of their festivals, foreign expeditions, and even details of the exploits of their convicts.

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If you were born 7000 years ago, you probably learned about recipes, hunting and farming techniques, and spirituality in an oral fashion. You could ask follow-up questions and poke holes in arguments. Learning was tied to the person you were conversing with. When pictographic representations and writing scripts came around, learning started the shift from live, in-person, interactions to on-demand.

Language is a form of technology. As physical tools relate to physical labor, so does language relates to cognitive labor. The labor of articulating our ideas so that other people can understand — perhaps act on — them.

Technology is a democratizing force. An average person can reasonably afford the best mobile supercomputer that Elon Musk uses — an iPhone. The outcomes of technological revolutions are never equally distributed, though. The gains are distributed with a long tail. Most of the benefits accrue to those who rush to the front of the line and master the new tools, capturing the most value using the new tool. They use the tool to apply leverage in whatever domain they are focused on and achieve outsized results.

We all have access to the same words. Every literate person can access the dictionary. Yet some people are especially skilled at using words. They can create value from anything based on nothing but the words they choose, and the order and tone they deliver them with.

We call these people orators. They make fine priests, conveying the truth about unseen beings. They can command armies of men into battle. Politicians promising grand visions of the future.

Think of the impact of the written word. Ideas stopped being constrained by the distance your voice could travel. It could slip discreetly across borders and oceans.

To miss out on the step from oral to written language is to have missed out on a cognitive revolution. The gaps in outcomes among nations that have lasted centuries can be tied back to how well societies were able to organize by articulating and acting on their best ideas. Writing evolved into different forms to capture different types of ideas.

Prose for narrations, Legalese for laws, musical notation for tones, code for digitally executable thoughts, etc.

The current forms of AI that we have serve as a knowledge corpus for all of society. The simple explanation is that you can construct previously unseen sequences of words based on all previously existing text that is semantically similar.

The forms of text you can compose are limited to the types of text and languages that have been written down.

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Perhaps there is more to learn from history even from the little we have recorded of it. Cognitive revolutions². Inventing new forms of expression (predominantly through writing) helps capture perspectives and allows us to explore new ways of knowing, thinking, and doing.




Notes