Tom Chatfield on how we got from stone tools to AI

Technology describes the entirety of the human-made artefacts that extend our grasp of the world: not just computers and cars and planes, but also clocks, clothes, dwellings, weapons, written words and cooking vessels.

We can’t be sure when the first such artefacts appeared. But we do know that over three million years ago, ancestors so distant they didn’t even belong to our genus were creating crude tools: stones that they sharpened, in order, most likely, to help with butchery and breaking open animal bones.

In this, these ancient ancestors weren’t so different from several other groups of animals living today. Plenty of creatures can communicate richly, comprehend one another’s intentions and put tools to intelligent and creative use: not only our fellow primates but also cetaceans (whales and dolphins), cephalopods (squids and octopuses) and corvids (crows and ravens).

Some can even develop and pass on particular local practices. Subpopulations of orcas have been observed developing and passing on social “fads” such as ramming boats, while New Caledonian crows exhibit a “culture” of tool usage, creating distinct varieties of simple hooked tools from leaves in order to help them feed on insects.

Humans, however, are unique in having turned such craft into a shared body of knowledge and practices: a system of collective, cumulative discoveries that over mere hundreds of thousands of years has harnessed phenomena like fire to cook food, smelt metal and generate power; gravity into systems of levers, ramps, pulleys, wheels and counterweights; mental processes into art, numeracy, literacy and computation.

This, above all, marks humanity’s departure from the rest of life on Earth. Alone among species – at least until the crows have put in a few million years’ more effort – humans can improve and combine their creations over time. It is through this process of recursive iteration that tools became technologies; and technology a world- altering force.

In his 2009 book The Nature of Technology, the economist W Brian Arthur argues that it’s not only pointless but also actively misleading to do what most history books cannot resist, and treat technology’s lineage as a greatest-hits list of influential inventions and inventors: to tell stirring tales of the creation of the compass, the clock, the printing press, the lightbulb, the iPhone.

This is not because such inventions weren’t important, but because it obscures the fact that all new technologies are at root a recombination of older technologies – and that their emergence enacts an evolutionary process resembling the one governing life itself.

Consider the printing press, the inevitable poster-child for anyone wanting to offer a historical-ish perspective on the dissemination of information. The German inventor Johannes Gutenberg was, famously, the first European to develop a system for printing with movable type, in around 1450. Yet he was far from the first person to realise that using individual, movable components to create each character in a line was a good way to speed up printing.

Indeed, Gutenberg’s heroic presence in Western cultural history – complete with eponymous Bible – obscures many of the most significant elements of print’s global story. As early as the year 800, wooden blocks dipped in ink were being used in China to print entire pages of text onto paper. Between 972 and 983, no fewer than 5,048 volumes of the Buddhist canon known as the Tripitaka were printed from such wood blocks in the city of Chengdu, totalling around 130,000 unique pages. Experiments with movable wood-chiselled ideograms followed, along with attempts at producing individual porcelain characters, knowledge that spread alongside Chinese imperial expansion.

By around 1234, the Korean civil minister and scholar Choe Yun-ui – tasked by the ruling Goryeo dynasty with producing multiple copies of the Buddhist text The Prescribed Ritual Text of the Past and Present (Sangjeong Gogeum Yemun) – had adapted a coin-minting technique to create the first known form of printing with bronze characters, which were held in a wooden frame, inked and pressed against paper.

Choe Yun-ui is, arguably, the closest thing movable metal type has to an “inventor”; but the books he created were not widely distributed. By the time a German craftsman called Johannes Gutenberg began seeking investors for his latest venture two centuries later, some knowledge of printing had likely travelled along the great east–west trade routes of the silk road. Gutenberg – who had already been involved in a failed venture to make polished metal mirrors for pilgrims – suffered bankruptcy and repeated lawsuits during the course of his efforts to mechanise the labour-intensive business of producing books.

But he also benefited from the relatively small number of letters in German; from his knowledge of metal-smelting as a blacksmith and goldsmith, which helped him perfect the casting of a malleable yet durable alloy of lead, tin and antimony;and from his insight that the kind of wooden presses used for centuries in Germany to make wine could be repurposed for pressing type against paper, itself a technology developed in China 1,500 years previously.

Wooden wine-presses, metal alloys, the Roman alphabet, oil-based ink, paper: every piece of the puzzle assembled by Gutenberg and his collaborators was based in a pre-existing technology whose origin could itself be traced back through previous technologies, in unbroken sequence, to the very first tools. We may admire his ingenuity and tenacity – as we should that of Choe Yun-ui – but the desire to valorise a particular moment and individual tells us more about present priorities and preferences than about how technology develops over time.

This is an extract from Wise Animals: How Technology Has Made Us What We Are (Pan Macmillan) by Tom Chatfield. Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Tom Chatfield is our guest on A Drink with the Idler this Thursday 16 May, 6-7pm. Free to subscribers.

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