Duplicate this page before you start, and write your answers in your own copy.

Last lesson we asked: Does technology shape what we know, or does what we know shape technology?

You ranked technologies according to how much they changed what humans could know. Today, we zoom out. We are going to build a timeline of the entire history of technology and knowledge, from cuneiform to ChatGPT, and look for patterns.

As you work, hold this question in your mind: Does the pattern hold all the way through, or does something change when we reach AI?

🕰️ 1. The timeline task

You will work in small groups. Each group has been assigned a historical era:

  1. Ancient world to 500 BCE
    1. Example: c. 3200 BCE – Cuneiform writing (Sumer) – Allowed laws, trade records and stories to be stored outside human memory for the first time, meaning knowledge could outlive the people who created it.
  2. 500 BCE to 500 CE (classical world)
    1. Example: c. 100 CE – Paper (China) – Made recording knowledge far cheaper and lighter than bamboo strips or silk, enabling wider circulation of texts across the empire.
  3. 500 to 1500 (medieval period)
    1. Example: c. 1040 – Movable type printing (China/Korea) – Allowed texts to be reproduced more quickly than hand-copying, making religious and scholarly knowledge available beyond monasteries.
  4. 1500 to 1800 (printing press to Enlightenment)
    1. Example: 1608 – Telescope (Lippershey/Galileo) – Galileo's observations with it, such as the phases of Venus, gave strong evidence that the Earth orbits the Sun, challenging centuries of accepted knowledge about our place in the universe.
  5. 1800 to 1950 (industrial revolution through world wars)
    1. Example: 1837 – Electric telegraph (Morse) – Meant that knowledge of distant events could travel faster than any person, fundamentally changing what people could know about the world beyond their immediate surroundings.
  6. 1950 to 2000 (computing age)
    1. Example: 1990 – World Wide Web (Berners-Lee) – Gave ordinary individuals access to knowledge previously locked in libraries, universities and government archives, removing geography as a barrier to knowing.
  7. 2000 to present (the AI era)
    1. Example: 2016 – AlphaGo (DeepMind) – Beat Lee Sedol, one of the world's best players, at Go, using moves no human had thought to play, raising the question of whether a machine can produce genuinely new knowledge.

For your era, find 4–6 technologies that changed what humans could know. For each one, enter the following into the shared Google Sheet: