The "Flipbook" States of Technology: Cultural Gestations and Future Revolutions

The Flipbook of Today. AI art

Introduction

Great inventions rarely appear overnight. More often, they pass through a period of incubation, during which preliminary techniques or embryonic devices announce what is to come. Like in pregnancy, humanity experiences cultural “labor pains” before giving birth to a new technological era. A child turning the pages of a folioscope and laughing at a dog that seems to walk cannot imagine that he is handling the seed of cinema. In the same way, someone using Word’s predictive text or Google’s search suggestions twenty years ago could not have foreseen that this simple principle would eventually underpin today’s LLMs. This essay examines such early moments—cinema, artificial intelligence, the printing press—frames them within a broader theoretical perspective, and asks: what are the flipbooks of our own time?

From Flipbook to Cinema: The Seed of Movement

The flipbook, or “thumb cinema,” is a humble toy: a stack of drawings that, when flipped quickly, conjure motion. Its secret lies in persistence of vision, the tendency of the eye to retain an image for a fraction of a second. However primitive, this toy already carried the logic of cinema: a seamless flow born from discrete frames. Tom Gunning (1990) describes early cinema as a “cinema of attractions,” a form nearer to magic and spectacle than to narrative art. The folioscope belongs to this lineage of wonder, a precursor that decades later took shape in the Lumière brothers’ invention.

From Predictive Text to Language Models: The Genesis of Anticipation

A comparable story unfolds in the history of linguistic technologies. Long before ChatGPT or Gemini, there were tools that guessed letters and words: autocomplete in search engines, predictive text on mobile phones, or autocorrect in word processors. Their logic was basic but unmistakable: given part of a context, propose the most likely continuation. Today’s large language models work on the same principle—predicting the next token—though with billions of parameters and vast training corpora. As Bender et al. (2021) noted, LLMs are “stochastic parrots,” amplifying this predictive function through sheer statistical scale. What matters, however, is the continuity: autocomplete systems were already, without our noticing, the linguistic flipbooks that foreshadowed the current AI revolution.

The Printing Press and Its Precursors: From Seals to Movable Type

Gutenberg’s press (ca. 1450) profoundly reshaped written culture, yet it did not arise from a void. Its emergence reflects a long gestational process. In Mesopotamia, cylinder seals reproduced inscriptions. In seventh-century China, entire texts were carved into wooden blocks for printing. Late medieval Europe had its block books, pages laboriously cut into wood. Each technique addressed the problem of duplication in part, but none achieved the modular efficiency of movable type. By turning every letter into a reusable block, Gutenberg brought maturity to a centuries-long evolution. The printing press, Eisenstein (1979) maintains, was an inevitable outcome of Europe’s hunger for religious, legal, and scientific texts, not a historical accident.

Theoretical Framework

The metaphor of cultural pregnancy resonates with several theories of science and technology:

• Thomas Kuhn (1962) argued that science advances through revolutions that follow periods of crisis. Inventions embody these “labor pains” before a paradigm shift.
• Gilbert Simondon (1958) described the genesis of technical objects: each begins in hybrid, clumsy forms before reaching coherence. The flipbook is a hybrid, cinema a fully individuated object.
• Robert K. Merton (1973) emphasized “multiple discovery”: ideas like calculus or evolution emerged independently in different places, showing collective readiness.
• Even in a Hegelian vein, one might say that each epoch bears a Zeitgeist that presses toward certain inventions. Humanity, beneath the surface, incubates the tools it needs.

Together these perspectives ground the intuition: every great leap begins in a half-formed state where necessity has already announced itself.

Today’s Technological Prototypes

Which of today’s devices might prove to be tomorrow’s revolutions?

1. Brain–computer interfaces. At present they permit only crude cursor movements or slow text entry, but they hint at fluent mind–machine dialogue that could transform communication itself.
2. Quantum computing. Still costly and cumbersome, they resemble block books in their inefficiency yet reveal the architecture of a coming paradigm in simulation and discovery.
3. Synthetic biology and gene editing. CRISPR makes precise interventions possible, but we remain at the threshold of a biological redesign with immense consequences.
4. Augmented reality and immersive worlds. Now they appear as gimmicks or awkward prototypes, but like early cinema, they may mature into a new cultural medium.
5. General-purpose robotics. Today’s domestic robots barely sweep floors, yet they foreshadow multipurpose autonomous agents.

All these techniques show signs of immaturity, but also the embryonic logic that may crystallize into revolutions within decades.

Conclusion

The child amused by a moving-picture booklet, the office worker relying on predictive text, or the monk bent over a block book do not know that they are touching the embryos of future epochs. Yet these modest acts reveal the rhythm of technological history: what begins in miniature later towers as monument.

To read our present flipbooks—quantum computing, synthetic biology, neural interfaces—may be the best way to glimpse the printing presses, cinemas, and artificial intelligences of tomorrow, for “to understand the genesis of the technical is also to understand the genesis of the human” (Simondon, 1958).

References

• Bender, E., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?. Proceedings of FAccT.
• Eisenstein, E. (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge University Press.
• Gunning, T. (1990). “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. BFI Publishing.
• Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
• Merton, R. K. (1973). The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. University of Chicago Press.
• Simondon, G. (1958). Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Aubier.