We've Been Here Before: Why Learning with AI Is No Different to Learning to Read
In this weeks studies, I could not make an association with business, but it did make me think about all the AI hype and technology. It is like learning to read again and Human beings are not born to read.
Unlike speech, which appears to be hardwired into our biology, reading and writing have no dedicated home in the brain. When we learn to read, the brain physically rewires itself — borrowing neural circuits evolved for entirely different purposes and repurposing them for something they were never designed to do. Neuroscientists call it neuronal recycling. What it means in plain language is this: literacy is a technology we install into our own minds, one painful lesson at a time.
That single fact reframes everything I thought I understood about where we are right now with artificial intelligence, digital tools, and the growing pressure on all of us to somehow "keep up."
Because we have been here before. More than once.
The First Disruption
When the Phoenicians developed the phonetic alphabet and the Greeks refined it somewhere around the 7th century BCE, it wasn't celebrated as an unambiguous triumph. Plato, one of history's great minds, was deeply suspicious of writing. In the Phaedrus he has the Egyptian king Thamus warn that writing will weaken memory, that authors will lose control of their meaning, that words set loose on the page can be misunderstood with no author present to correct the reader.
Sound familiar? Substitute "writing" for "AI-generated content" and Thamus could be a guest on any podcast running today.
The anxiety was real. The disruption was real. And yet writing didn't destroy human thought — it transformed it. It enabled the transmission of knowledge across generations in ways that oral tradition alone could never sustain. It was, in the most literal sense, a new technology. And society had to develop new literacies to use it wisely.
The Cycle Repeats
Then came movable-type printing, and the cycle began again. Books multiplied. Knowledge escaped the monasteries. Luther used the printing press to put scripture into ordinary hands — and then used it again to reassert control when things got uncomfortable. The same technology that liberated also threatened. The same arguments about access, authority, misinformation and the erosion of expertise echoed across 15th century Europe just as they echo across our timelines today.
Then the telegraph. Then radio. Then cinema. Then television. Each arrival brought the same pattern: disruption, moral panic, gradual adaptation, and eventually a new literacy that allowed people to engage critically rather than be simply swept along.
Every single time, the people wringing their hands about the new technology were not wrong to be cautious. But the cycle did not pause to accommodate their concerns.
Where We Are Now
The digital turn, and particularly the emergence of artificial intelligence, is not a departure from this cycle. It is the latest iteration of it.
What's different this time is the pace, and perhaps the scale. The gap between disruption and adaptation is compressing. The new literacies being demanded of us — digital literacy, information literacy, data literacy, AI literacy — are not replacing the old ones. They are layering on top of them, just as writing layered on top of orality, just as print layered on top of manuscript culture.
And just as our ancestors were not born to read, we are not born to think critically about algorithms, to interrogate AI outputs, or to navigate a media environment where anyone with a device can publish anything to a global audience without a single gatekeeper deciding whether it's true.
These are learned skills. Technologies of the mind. And they have to be taught, practised, and developed — not assumed.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Is this right or wrong? I find I'm less interested in that question the more I think about it. The printing press wasn't right or wrong. Television wasn't right or wrong. They were, and the world adapted around them.
What interests me more is the historical observation that in every previous cycle, there were two kinds of people. Those who developed the new literacy — who learned to read contracts when others were still relying on handshakes, who understood what the camera was doing when others simply watched — and those who didn't, and were consequently dependent on those who did.
The uncomfortable truth is that we are Gutenberg's contemporaries. We are living inside the inflection point, with no reliable view of where it leads. Future generations will look back at this moment the way we look back at the introduction of the printing press — as something that changed everything, gradually and then all at once.
The cycle is not beginning. It is already well underway.
The only real question is where you choose to stand in relation to it.
If you're not sure where your business sits on the digital maturity spectrum, the EU Digital Maturity Assessment is a free tool that takes about 15 minutes and gives you a clear picture of where to focus first.