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Twenty years ago, whilst working as a subeditor at a science and technology publication, I was assigned to interview a Hungarian computer scientist about an early form of AI. I confessed to my editor that I knew nothing about AI, nor computer science of any kind. He stopped typing, stared at me and took a measured sip of water. “And when you’ve finished the interview, that will hopefully have changed.”

We met in the caverns of the British Library, and it was there that I first heard of the Kish Tablet. Over 5,000 years old, it is often cited as the oldest example of written text. The name might suggest something like the Ten Commandments, but the tablet is a brief pictographic bookkeeping record, carved into a chunk of limestone about the same height and width as an iPhone.

The Hungarian had just seen a replica and spoke of it at length. He chuckled at the thought of an ancient Sumerian market trader clutching his stone tablet, pacing the desert and tutting over the numbers. It didn’t make the article, but it stayed with me, as some things do.

Since then, writing has taken me through journalism, design, branding and film. Different as they are, each has the same task at its heart: helping people understand.

In 2024, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, tweeted: ‘openai now generates about 100 billion words per day. all people on earth generate about 100 trillion words per day.’ The tweet was viewed 2.9 million times. I pictured him typing it on his own tablet, pacing the sands of San Francisco. Five thousand years on, we’ve come a long way.

Yet the reason we write hasn’t changed. The Sumerians didn’t carve stones to create words. They carved them to carry information. Trade had grown too complex to keep in their heads, and writing gave them clarity.

Today we live in a world of free-flowing ideas, and our need for clarity has only grown. Words are powerful things, capable of carrying a thought from one mind to a million. You just have to choose the right ones.