Dwarkesh Patel

So if you're printing in Venice, you print 300 Bibles, you give 10 Bibles to each of 30 ship's captains going to 30 different cities.

They can sell them.

And the first economically sustainable circulation of print is enabled by the hub system.

Then book fairs come into existence in which printers will spend all year printing a book.

They go with a thousand copies of their book to a book fair where there are a thousand other printers.

They all trade and then they go home to their town with five copies each of 200 books each.

instead of 1,000 copies of one book, and then they sell them in bookshops.

So things like the Frankfurt Book Fair, which still exists today, developed as the distribution mechanism.

So there's a slow growth and a slow saturation.

And that's really cool, because one of the things I think people think is unique

about our present information revolution is that we're living in this sequence of successive information revolutions, right?

We had the computer.

The computer was exciting.

And then we had the personal computer.

And then we had the internet.

And we had the cell phone.

And then we had social media.

And now we have different social media networks coming in, successively causing crises one after the other.

And then we have LLMs and other applications of machine learning and gen AI, right?

And it's easy to think of each of these as different things