We’re Living Through the Biggest Shift in Knowledge Since the Printing Press
Recent Bloomberg coverage of our work at Handshake got me thinking about how we’re living through a pivotal moment in the democratization of knowledge. From clay tablets to AI, expert knowledge is becoming vastly more accessible to all. At Handshake AI, I’m building training and curriculum for domain experts to work with AI…not only as users, also as co-reasoners. My team is helping graduate students, and doctoral fellows, from physics to music, level up AI and their own skills faster than ever. These PhDs are part of a historic moment that is reshaping knowledge. As a former professor of Social Studies Education, I can’t help but place us in this moment in context. Here are five moments that, in my view, have led to the democratization of knowledge:
~105 CE: The Invention of Paper
Knowledge made mobile for the first time. Lightweight, inexpensive, and durable (much like today’s cell phone!), papyrus into paper made writing widely accessible, no longer confined to breakable clay tablets or royal archives. Knowledge could now travel.
~1440 CE: The printing press
The printing press shattered the elite monopoly on knowledge. Texts could be mass-produced. Literacy soared and ushered in the Renaissance.
Mid 19th Century: Mass Schooling
Horace Mann and “the common school” brought on the idea of public education ultimately spreading across the globe. This ushers in the rise of the nationstate, and questions regarding “what is knowledge” “how do we teach it” and “who defines knowledge?”
1970s - 1990s: The personal computer and the internet
The PC era marked a tectonic shift and put technology and tools for communication, creation, computation, and discovery at our fingertips and connected us across time and space as never before.
2025: Expert LLMs and AI
Today, AI is more than knowledge dissemination, expert AI is becoming a thought partner for anyone, anywhere, anytime on any topic you can imagine. At Handshake AI, we’re equipping PhDs to collaborate with AI at the highest levels of rigor by building systems of trust, supervision, and alignment.
