If a pixel can be printed with no colors (white), cyan, magenta, yellow, cyan and magenta (blue), magenta and yellow (red), yellow and cyan (green), or all three inks (black), that's 8 colors, 3 bits per pixel, not just 3 colors. Typically laser and inkjet printers do more or less work like this, but also have a fourth ink, which is black.
I am very skeptical of this idea that people will be able to write but unable to produce useful digital computers. Computers are a mathematical discovery, not an electronic invention. Electronics makes them a thousand times faster, but a computer made out of wood, flax threads, and bent copper wire would still be hundreds of times faster than a person at tabulating logarithms, balancing ledgers, calculating ballistic trajectories, casting horoscopes, encrypting messages, forecasting finances, calculating architectural measurements, or calculating compound interest. So I think automatic computation as such is likely to survive if any human intellectual tradition does.
I am very skeptical of this idea that people will be able to write but unable to produce useful digital computers.
I agree. When I first saw the post and the mention of humans in the reading end of the loop, I though "maybe there is a scifi story here". Hard to imagine a scenario that left humans but not many artifacts except caches of paper (or other "printed" media). Maybe a remote tribe of uncontacted people (or another species altogether) inherit the Earth after a modern world apocalypse kills off everyone in the technologically more advanced world.
A civilization starting from scratch would still need to develop a fair bit of math and tech/science sophistication before understanding and starting to use artifacts left behind. In particular optical/color on paper scanners would have been difficult before the 20th century.
Comments
If a pixel can be printed with no colors (white), cyan, magenta, yellow, cyan and magenta (blue), magenta and yellow (red), yellow and cyan (green), or all three inks (black), that's 8 colors, 3 bits per pixel, not just 3 colors. Typically laser and inkjet printers do more or less work like this, but also have a fourth ink, which is black.
I am very skeptical of this idea that people will be able to write but unable to produce useful digital computers. Computers are a mathematical discovery, not an electronic invention. Electronics makes them a thousand times faster, but a computer made out of wood, flax threads, and bent copper wire would still be hundreds of times faster than a person at tabulating logarithms, balancing ledgers, calculating ballistic trajectories, casting horoscopes, encrypting messages, forecasting finances, calculating architectural measurements, or calculating compound interest. So I think automatic computation as such is likely to survive if any human intellectual tradition does.
I am very skeptical of this idea that people will be able to write but unable to produce useful digital computers.
I agree. When I first saw the post and the mention of humans in the reading end of the loop, I though "maybe there is a scifi story here". Hard to imagine a scenario that left humans but not many artifacts except caches of paper (or other "printed" media). Maybe a remote tribe of uncontacted people (or another species altogether) inherit the Earth after a modern world apocalypse kills off everyone in the technologically more advanced world.
A civilization starting from scratch would still need to develop a fair bit of math and tech/science sophistication before understanding and starting to use artifacts left behind. In particular optical/color on paper scanners would have been difficult before the 20th century.