“Nobody’s reality is more or less real.” — Kevin Ashton
It’s the chicken and egg question. What came first: stories or language? For Kevin Ashton, the answer is stories. In his new book, The Story of Stories, Ashton argues that rather than inventing stories with language, we invented language to tell stories. Stories, for Ashton, predate language. They are what makes us human.
300,000 years ago, Ashton argues, humans sat around night fires needing to talk about things they couldn’t point to — the past, the future, the Gods. So they created language. Grunts got grammatical. And the grammar had a structure that hasn’t changed since: character, chronology, consequence. Every sentence in every one of the world’s 7,000 languages is built upon the need to tell stories. Every conversation you’ve ever had contains a narrative. Even this one.
I asked Ashton whether this makes reality itself just another narrative and him just another postmodernist. Our brains construct reality, he explained, in the same way a graphic user interface constructs a desktop. Our dog sees a different rainbow to the one we see. But, in contrast with our dog, we tell stories about that rainbow.
Ashton is a technologist who first coined the term “Internet of Things”. But on AI, he is surprisingly critical. A large language model is a more complicated toaster, he says. It can produce language that fits the format of a story — character, chronology, consequence — because it’s digested millions of words. But it can’t produce meaning. We humans, in contrast, are made meaningful by our stories. That’s why you are reading this now.
Five Takeaways
• Stories Came Before Language. We didn’t invent stories with language. We invented language to tell stories. The structure — character, chronology, consequence — is universal across all 7,000 languages.
• Nobody’s Reality Is Real. Our brains construct reality like a graphic user interface. Your dog sees a different rainbow. Both are equally real. Neither is objectively true.
• The Bible Hitched a Ride on Writing. The world’s great religions spread by exploiting writing as distribution technology. The oldest story is Noah’s flood — from Southern Iraq, not Greece.
• AI Is a More Complicated Toaster. A machine can mimic the format of a story. It cannot produce meaning. Machines are inherently meaningless.
• We Are Made Meaningful by Our Stories. Ashton’s own life — DJ to Norwegian scholar to lipstick marketer to MIT — is proof. No algorithm would have written it.
About the Guest
Kevin Ashton coined “the Internet of Things” and co-founded the Auto-ID Center at MIT. The Story of Stories is published by Harper.
References
The Story of Stories: https://www.amazon.com/Story-Stories-Million-Year-History-Uniquely/dp/0063438690
How to Fly a Horse: https://www.amazon.com/How-Fly-Horse-Invention-Discovery/dp/0385538596
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow
Chapters:
00:00:00 Introduction: technology tells good stories about itself
00:01:46 Language was invented to tell stories, not the other way around
00:04:47 If stories are our water, how do you get outside them?
00:06:40 Character, chronology, consequence: the Lego brick of narrative
00:07:07 Hyper-realism and the graphic user interface of reality
00:09:05 Nobody’s reality is real — your dog sees a different rainbow
00:12:35 Darwin, Einstein, and science as storytelling
00:14:32 True stories, true crime, and the O.J. Simpson test
00:17:15 The Bible as storytelling technology
00:21:49 Socrates vs. Plato: speech, writing, and the Reformation
00:23:49 The Internet of Stories: from campfire to smartphone
00:25:05 Were the Greeks really better storytellers? No.
00:28:49 Favourite storytellers: Pynchon, McCarthy, Dead Space
00:30:43 Chess, Go, and games as narrative
00:31:07 AI: a more complicated toaster
00:35:43 Kevin Ashton’s own accidental story