Though the scripts look completely different, hieroglyphs emerged after cuneiform was established. This suggests Egyptian travelers or diplomats encountered the *idea* of writing in Mesopotamia. They then developed their own system using culturally relevant pretty pictures instead of adopting abstract cuneiform signs.

The printing press wasn't conceived for Bibles or intellectual enlightenment. It was a commercial hustle by Gutenberg to automate the production of "indulgences"—paid certificates from the Catholic Church promising salvation. The press solved a production bottleneck for a highly profitable product.

Unlike physical technologies like the internet, money is a social technology. It's an invented system of trust that allows billions of strangers to cooperate and transact, forming the basis for complex civilization. It is the fifth element, propelling human progress.

Money is not just a medium of exchange; it is a core social technology that allows individuals to influence others' actions without resorting to violence. When monetary systems fail, society reverts to a state where physical power dictates outcomes.

While writing enabled literature, its initial large-scale driver was administration. The Sumerians quickly developed sophisticated numeracy and bookkeeping to manage tithes, track goods, and run their city-states. This established accounting as a foundational use of the written word.

Historically, well-structured writing served as a reliable signal that the author had invested time in research and deep thinking. Economist Bernd Hobart notes that because AI can generate coherent text without underlying comprehension, this signal is lost. This forces us to find new, more reliable ways to assess a person's actual knowledge and wisdom.

The most effective way to convey complex information, even in data-heavy fields, is through compelling stories. People remember narratives far longer than they remember statistics or formulas. For author Morgan Housel, this became a survival mechanism to differentiate his writing and communicate more effectively.

Human communication is returning to its oral and visual roots. Text, a low-dimensional medium, was a temporary necessity for scalable knowledge storage—a 'parenthesis' in history. As AI makes creating rich media as easy as writing, society will default back to more natural, higher-bandwidth formats like audio and video.

Cuneiform began as pictographs for simple records like "three bottles of milk." Its revolutionary leap was using those symbols to represent sounds (syllables), enabling the writing of abstract thought, complex grammar, and literature that pictures alone could not capture.