AI: Medieval Page in a Digital Era

Paging All Innovators

AI in its current form can be viewed through 3 historical uses of the word “page”.

AI is a servant (medieval page), that searches through pages when called upon, which then fastens them together (pangere) with new meaning.

Diving into the etymology of the many forms of the word “page” illuminates this point. The noun, “page”, in reference to what we now call a sheet of paper or in digital form, the web page, comes from an earlier meaning of "to create a row of vines that form a rectangle”.

The verb page comes from the Latin meaning “to fasten”. Other synonyms and interpretations of the verb form “pangere” are: to compose, to determine, and record.

In both instances we see the emphasis on interconnecting things into a new flat form of record.

Modern LLM’s untangle the core structures of knowledge, which are semantically and structurally bound by their original forms. By flattening these forms into one searchable space, it fastens together a more uniform structure, parsable by itself. When called upon, it is then easily able to traverse these seemingly disparate forms to fasten together the ideas from them as if there were all of the same type originally.

While many feel current LLM’s simply take a page out of someone else’s book and copy it as their own, that’s simply not the case. If it were only doing that, it would look like much earlier computer systems that stumble when sentence structure is unconventional or new problems it had never seen before were presented. What these systems are clearly doing is flattening the knowledge space into a new parsable dimension that factors in an uncountable number of factors, but let’s the model do it’s job in returning back proper and useful answers to the end user. It’s able to seemingly make inferences and fill in the gaps of the knowledge space or make novel predictions based on the interconnections in the question space or their lack of.

This is in direct inversion to the introduction of the printing press where pages and consistent alphabetics drove separation on the page and in the mind. This new page structure flattens the entire knowledge space, known and unknown into one universal page, ready to be called upon and weaved into new forms at any moment. The Latin “pagus” where the servant form of page is derived, is loosely translated as “a space with fixed boundaries”. This new knowledge space created is more vast than any previous system, but the boundaries themselves are never changing.

What we have now are digital servants setting the record in knowledge space by fastening new forms together from the pages of its own fixed space.