Interview with Kevin Ashton

As promised in my post “Stories and Storytellers” earlier this year, here is my written interview with Kevin Ashton, whose nonfiction book The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art came out this week. Read on to find out more.

It’s pure coincidence that this interview follows hard on the heels of last week’s post about using AI to produce (not merely inform) novels. But Ashton’s points certainly illuminate some of the issues raised by machine-based storytelling.

What inspired you to write a nonfiction book about stories, storytelling, and the developing technologies associated with them?

I guess it was interest, not inspiration. Or maybe interests, plural. Starting in 1999, I developed new information technology at MIT and during that process became interested in the deep, evolutionary role of communication in our lives. In the mid-2010s it became obvious to me that in the mid-2020s ninety percent of the world would own a smartphone. I wondered what changes that might bring and set out to write a book about it. Along the way I realized that my question about the origins of communication and my question about smartphones were basically the same. Or at least I had to answer the first one in order to answer the second one. That realization led to The Story of Stories.

Early on, you say, “Language did not give us stories; stories gave us language.” What do you mean by that?

There’s a general assumption, which is reasonable if wrong, that language developed, and then we started using it to tell stories. That’s actually the wrong way round. The need to tell stories, which arose from discovering how to make and control fire, created the evolutionary pressure that gradually transformed simple mating cries and warning calls into the infinitely expressive system of language. We developed language in order to tell better stories, basically.

You argue that stories and storytelling are “intrinsically human”—part of our DNA, in fact. What purpose do they serve?

Stories are how we communicate with others, and also how we communicate with ourselves: they are the format of almost all of our thinking, and almost all of our self-expression, and they serve two fundamental purposes: one is to give a feeling a meaning to our lives and our world; the other is to help us understand the people around us, both individually and collectively. Stories are the principal structure of both our inner lives and our social lives.

As a historian and a novelist, the fundamental characteristics of stories that you define are familiar, in the form of reader expectations: human-like agents, actions told in a chronological sequence, plot and character arcs heading for resolution. How do these expectations govern our approach to reality?

That’s a really interesting and important question. Reality is not, in fact, story-shaped. Most things happen by chance, not as a result of human actions, and the world is not just: people often do not get the consequences they deserve. But we tend to interpret the world as story-shaped nonetheless, because meaning brings the comfort we need to survive and reproduce even though we know we will die, and motivates all of our conscious actions. This is useful and helpful up to a point, but if we always insist that the external, objective world conforms to the shape of stories, we can end up making bad choices. For example, some people are so determined to see human actions behind unlikely events that they come to believe a secret cabal of celebrities, or Jewish people, or lizard-like aliens are in charge of the world. That is a form of madness. The universe does not conform to the rules of story, even though our minds try to impose story-like structure on our experiences.

Later in the book, you talk about the ways that our “story-shaped brains” are not well served, in some respects, by twenty-first-century technology. Would you say a bit about that part of your argument?

All storytelling technology is used for both good things and bad things. Every new storytelling technology such as writing, printing, social media increases the number of people who can tell stories to an even larger number of people. When a technology is really new, it is only available to an exclusive few: at first few people could read, and even fewer people could write, for example. At that stage, it can be used to communicate a single worldview to everyone. A single religion, or a story about how one King is the rightful king, or whatever. Then it becomes cheaper and more common, and people start telling competing stories, stories that challenge conventional wisdom, stories that represent unrepresented people, and so on. At the current time, technologies like the internet and print-on-demand publishing have increased the number of stories by and about transgender people, for example, which I would argue is good; but those same technologies have also given rise to a resurgence in antisemitic and racist stories, which I would argue is bad. Social media is especially interesting in this regard, because social media platforms like Facebook publish unmoderated, unedited user-generated stories to the world entire, whether they are true or false, helpful or harmful. A case I explore in the book is how anti-vaccination stories would still be on the fringes if it weren’t for social media, and ubiquitous anti-vaccination stories led to a lot of people dying needlessly of COVID.

What solutions do you perceive for the problems you identify?

Social media billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg do not want to change this, because moderating hate speech and dangerous propaganda requires employing human editors, which costs money, which they do not want to spend. Facebook is never going to stop publishing deadly and dangerous stories because Zuckerberg is insane with greed. The same is true of all the other major platforms. So we have to learn how to be better at critical thinking and critical reading, and teach our children those skills too. Governments are unlikely to do it: critical thinking undermines their authority. So we have to teach ourselves to be ever more critical about the stories we consume and therefore the stories we tell. And that requires a large amount of humility. We can all be fooled, we can all be misled, we are all motivated to believe some things more readily than others. None of us are immune to skillfully crafted propaganda and other forms of manipulation by story.

Are there points I haven’t raised that you would especially like readers to know about?

We’ve covered almost all the important things. I’d close by saying it is essential that we all continue to improve our understanding of how stories affect our minds and therefore our behavior, and also our understanding of the systems that deliver stories to us. We need to remain alert to both the opportunities and risks of storytelling, and especially storytelling delivered by whatever the new and common technologies of the day happen to be.

Kevin Ashton is a visionary technologist and author. He coined the term “the Internet of Things,” and co-founded and led the Auto-ID Center at MIT. His first book, How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery, was named Porchlight’s “Business Book of the Year.” He lives in Austin, Texas. Find out more about him at https://www.harpercollins.com/blogs/authors/kevin-ashton-88205.