Miller's core prediction isn't about information loss—it's about the collapse of inference.

The Church doesn't venerate the technical blueprints because monks understand them; they venerate them precisely because they don't, and believe understanding will eventually return, which is the trap.

In the second section, six centuries later, the scholars still can't parse what the drawings mean. They've transcribed them perfectly and built entire theological frameworks around their incomprehensibility, but they cannot think themselves back into the original maker's problem-space.

The blueprint for a lighter exists, and so does the cognitive gulf between seeing a blueprint and understanding why that particular solution solves that particular problem. This gap—between perfect documentation and zero inference ability—is what Miller actually saw coming: not dark ages of ignorance, but dark ages of intact records nobody knows how to interrogate. Brother Thomas copies the blueprints with such reverence that illegibility becomes sacred—he's not stupid, but experiencing the moment when fidelity to the text replaces understanding of the text.

We live this now. We have APIs we don't understand and code that works while nobody alive knows why, and Miller saw that the real extinction event isn't forgetting your library—it's keeping your library while losing the ability to think like the people who built it.