Every civilisational shift in how information moves has produced a new literacy. We are living through the biggest such shift in five hundred years. We have not yet produced the literacy to match it.
In 2016, Geoffrey Hinton — one of the founding figures of modern AI — published a diagram ranking what computers could and could not do. Under the heading "nowhere near solved" he listed: understanding a story and answering questions about it. Writing interesting stories. Interpreting a work of art. Human-level general intelligence.
Every item on that list is now either solved or actively contested. The diagram is less than a decade old.
This is not a story about technology moving fast. It is a story about a civilisational shift arriving without the cultural infrastructure to receive it — without the habits, practices, and social norms that every previous shift of this magnitude eventually produced. We have the press. We are still waiting for literacy.
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Four accelerants, four literacies
There is a category of invention — I call these Hyperludic accelerants, or Cognologies — that does not merely add a new tool to human life. It changes the substrate of thought itself by transforming the nature of information. Language made information coherent. Writing made information permanent. Print made information prevalent. AI makes information malleable — generative, interactive, abundant, and soft. The page has become clay.
Each shift produced disruption, anxiety, and eventually a new literacy. Reading and writing were not natural. They were trained. They required institutions, curricula, and the social agreement that this was a thing worth learning.
AI is the fourth accelerant. It does not merely make information faster or cheaper. It makes information malleable. And we have no literacy for it yet.
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What passes for literacy is not enough
There is no shortage of "AI literacy" programmes. Most of them teach prompting. Some teach safety. A few teach ethics. They are well-intentioned and largely insufficient — not because the content is wrong, but because the frame is wrong. Teaching someone to prompt an AI model is a little like commissioning a scriptorium to produce a manuscript explaining the best uses for the printing press. It can be done. It is not nothing. But it is not the thing.
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Ludicity: the discipline for the new medium
Ludicity — from ludus, the Latin for play and game — is the name I give to this new literacy. It is the capacity to explore, exploit, and explain AI systems through playful rigour: treating information not as sacred and fixed but as malleable and abundant, and pairing that creative freedom with the discipline of verification. The mantra: Probe the space. Shape the flow. Verify the claim.
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Why this is urgent
The printing press did not simply add books to the world. It rewired the distribution of authority, the pace of idea propagation, and the social conditions of knowledge. Within a century of Gutenberg, the institutions that had managed information for a millennium were under fundamental challenge. We are in the equivalent of the 1460s. The press exists. The indulgences are already being printed. The Reformation has not yet arrived, but its preconditions are accumulating.
The question is not whether AI will change institutions, norms, and the distribution of authority. It will. The question is whether we build the literacy in time to shape how.
Print took roughly a century to produce the institutions and practices that made it governable and generative. We do not have a century. The question of how people relate to abundant, malleable, generative information is being decided now — in schools, in organisations, in policy, in culture. The literacy that answers it already has a name.