- The Sumerians invented writing to track grain and debts. They got Homer, Plato, and the novel—empathy for strangers across time and space.
- We adopt media for affordances, what they make easy. But literacy’s real value came from secondary effects: counterfactual reasoning, long-horizon abstraction, inner life.
- AI’s affordance is clear: answer questions, write emails, generate code. Its secondary effects—what externalized reasoning accidentally builds or destroys—are invisible to us now.
“Society selects for media based on efficiency (affordances), but literacy’s civilizational value lies in secondary effects—‘recursive empathy, long-horizon abstraction, disciplined counterfactual reasoning’—that resist monetization.”
This is humbling. We can’t know what AI is really for until it’s already reshaped us. Writing was designed for inventory and became the substrate for philosophy. What will prompt engineering become in 500 years?