Adapting to technological advances is a defining part of the 21s-century life. Just two months after being launched in November 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT has already reached an audience of over 100 million people. While ChatGPT threatens to change writing and writing-related work, the Mesopotamians, who lived 4,000 years ago in a geographical area centered in modern-day Iraq, went through this kind of far-reaching change before us.
Ancient Mesopotamia was home to many of civilization's early developments. Its people were world leaders in adapting to technological and cultural changes. They invented the wheel and agriculture, and pioneered advances in mathematics and urbanization. These breakthroughs are reflected in cuneiform(楔形文字) literature, one of the oldest known forms of writing.
In its literature, Mesopotamians don't present cultural and technological advances as consistently beneficial. They often represent new technologies being controlled in the service of human conflict and mostly serving the interests of those with high social positions. In some ways, the representation of new technologies in its literature echoes(映现) contemporary concerns about AI: fears of increasing social inequalities and its potential use in information war.
In recent years, AI — the newest form of writing — has been used to decipher(破译) the oldest: cuneiform literature. In broader fields, the boundaries of how AI may be used haven't been clearly explained. In January, for example, a top international AI conference banned the use of AI tools for writing scientific papers.
Humans have been struggling to invent, use and adapt to technology since our earliest civilizations. But the technology and resulting knowledge are not always evenly distributed. Knowing how we adapted to changing technology in the past helps us more fully understand the human condition and may even help us prepare for the future.
