From myth to machine: The technological evolution of storytelling

Throughout history, the ability to tell increasingly believable stories has become available to more people. Kevin Ashton says that’s a blessing and a curse.

This week, author and tech pioneer Kevin Ashton joins us to discuss how our ability to tell more believable stories has been a blessing and a curse.

Credit: Jacob Hege

by Tim Brinkhof

“There is nothing in the world more powerful than a good story,” Tyrion Lannister, played by Peter Dinklage, declares in the infamously lackluster finale of Game of Thrones. It sounds cliché, but in Westeros, it’s true.

The books the TV show is based on are called A Song of Ice and Fire, not “a history” or “an account.” Throughout the novels, characters tell stories to persuade, intimidate, and outmaneuver each other. Many live and die convinced that random chance is divine providence. Even political power, the axis around which the entire plot revolves, is a narrative — “a shadow on the wall,” as Varys the spymaster puts it.

Storytelling plays an equally important role in our world, Kevin Ashton argues in his new book, The Story of Stories. In fact, stories may play an even more important role as, unlike the citizens of Westeros, we have modern technology at our disposal.

“I wanted to write a book about how the smartphone changed the world,” Ashton, a tech pioneer and co-founder of MIT’s Auto-ID Lab, tells Big Think, “but the more I researched, the clearer it became that phones were actually the latest step in this evolution of storytelling technology that stretches all the way back to prehistoric times.”

Tracing the evolution of storytelling from hunter-gatherer campfires and medieval printing presses to VR and AI, Ashton identifies a number of developments that can be expected to carry on into the future, among them the increasing difficulty of distinguishing fact from fiction. Crucially, these developments in storytelling are not limited to the books we read, the films we see, or the video games we play. They shape and reshape nearly every aspect of society.

“Much of our present turmoil,” Ashton warns, “is the inevitable result of technology increasing the seismicity of stories.”

According to Ashton, the story of stories results from the interplay between a constant and a variable. The variable is technology: how stories are produced, preserved, distributed, and accessed. The constant is human nature: our largely unchanged biology and brain structure that renders us reliant on stories to make sense of ourselves and the world we live in — even when those tales turn out to be misleading, overly simplistic, or outright dangerous. As stories will only become more potent and powerful, Ashton adds, our well-being depends on understanding how they’re told.

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The evolution of storytelling

Ashton has identified four important developments in the evolution of storytelling. The first is that each new storytelling technology expands the audience. When all we had was orality, audiences were limited to the number of people who could huddle around a campfire to hear the storyteller. Writing systems enabled stories to travel farther and be preserved for repeat tellings. Today, Ashton notes, content on Facebook is often only a few shares away from reaching a “substantial fraction of the world’s population.”

Storytelling technologies have also allowed us to tell increasingly realistic, believable stories. “If you look at, say, the Norse sagas from 500 and 600 CE,” Ashton says, “it’s all very stylized — full of gods, magic, and other things that couldn’t really happen. Today, there’s a convincing illusion of realism. Computer-generated special effects and especially generative AI are starting to challenge our ability to know whether we are seeing something real or something imagined and fabricated.”

This illusion of realism will only become more convincing as the technology evolves. Large language models, such as ChatGPT, have passed Turing tests. Meanwhile, virtual modeling and, albeit to a lesser extent, humanoid robotics are slowly breaking through the uncanny valley — our instinctive distrust of things that look and act almost like human beings but not quite.

“At some point, the images we see on TV or on our laptops will appear three-dimensional,” Ashton says. “They’ll be of such a high resolution, our brains literally won’t be able to tell the difference between what we see on a screen, and what we see when we look out the window.”

Until now, the illusion of realism created by storytelling technologies has been limited to just two of our senses: sight and sound. However, if technologies achieve a direct and meaningful connection with the brain, storytellers may gain the ability to simulate touch, smell, and taste.

Speaking of access, the third development Ashton identified is the ability to tell increasingly believable stories that are available to more and more people. History offers plenty of examples here, such as the printing press removing long-standing social and economic barriers to authorship. But the most convincing are taking place right now. The growing prominence of independent filmmaking and game development shows that creatives don’t need giant teams or huge budgets to make entertainment that reach millions of people. With new tools like generative AI, it may not be long before the power to tell a story as immersive as a Hollywood blockbuster resides with a single person.

The last development is also the most concerning. As the power of stories and our ability to tell them expand, so does the role they play in our lives. Back when most of humanity lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, people learned primarily through direct experience. As societies grew more complex and people specialized into different roles and professions, they learned less through doing than through being told by others. Today, Ashton writes, the vast majority of what we know, we’ve learned through stories — stories told by our parents, friends, movies, newspapers, and social media users. A century on, this imbalance may be even more extreme.

Death by stories

The internet of things, a term Ashton coined in the late 1990s to describe how everyday devices embedded with sensors would connect the real world with its virtual counterpart, has given us useful and fairly uncontroversial applications — think satnav, earthquake alarms, and package tracking. But it’s also given companies like Meta and Google unprecedented insight into our behavior, tastes, and even our physical movement. This information can be shared without our awareness or express consent and is used by companies to interact with us in ways we aren’t always comfortable with.

The evolution of storytelling is similarly a two-sided coin: For every benefit, there’s a danger.

The growing reach of storytellers allows stories to travel throughout the world, but also facilitates the spread of misinformation. Just as many don’t know where the food they eat comes from or how it was processed, we are often ignorant of the sources of our information, as well as their potential biases and ulterior motivations. Reach also affects the quantity and quality of storytelling. The rise of social media, where anyone can share up-to-the-minute news, has gutted professional journalism, with Ashton noting that Facebook’s first 15 years saw the U.S. publishing industry shrink by more than 60%.

Increasingly realistic and believable storytelling can make for highly immersive entertainment, but it also makes us more vulnerable to exploitation. Stories prey on our emotions, not our rationality, and in many cases, the former takes precedence over the latter.

“We’ve evolved to survive, not to find the truth,” Ashton says. “One of the first written stories we know of is Sumerian religious propaganda. Religious writing in general asks you to believe something without much evidence, and our tendency to do just that is the foundation of storytelling.”

From the larger-than-life statues of Caesar Augustus to the films of Leni Riefenstahl, those in power have always relied on stories to color reality in their own image. What’s changed, Ashton says, are the ease, efficiency, and efficacy with which they’re able to do so. Today, Donald Trump can shape beliefs with a single tweet.

The more our knowledge of the world is rooted in others’ stories, the more control they have over our lives. Ashton argues that more than ever, stories exert a real, tangible force. In a chapter titled “Death by a Thousand Stories,” he describes in detail the events leading up to the death of an American man who refused to get vaccinated against COVID. His death, and the deaths of many others who were convinced to remain unvaccinated, might be as much owing to the narratives they were told as to the virus itself.

Setting the story straight

Concerns over the dangers of stories are nothing new. As Ashton points out, the story we tell about new storytelling technologies has remained fairly consistent across history. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates worries that books, unlike oral traditions, will make people more forgetful. Meanwhile, in the early 1900s, people feared broadcast radio would wrinkle their skin, dry up the sky, and even cause flooding by breaking up clouds.

Every innovation brings with it a myriad of fears, many of which are eventually disproven and reduced to conspiracy theories. But some, such as the polarizing effects of social media, hold up to scrutiny and should be taken seriously. Ultimately, many of the dangers of storytelling technologies arise not from the technologies themselves, but from the aspects of human nature they prey upon.

“It’s hardwired into us, and so the technology that succeeds is the technology that best exploits this,” Ashton says.

While regulation and ethical guidelines can mitigate some of the potential damage from bad-faith storytellers, it’s equally important that we, their audience, learn to protect ourselves. In Story of Stories, Ashton calls for a combination of critical thinking and media literacy.

“The first thing you need to understand is that almost everything anybody tells you is, at its core, a story,” he says. “There’s no such thing as a completely objective or neutral story. Every story is selective; it has an agenda. It’s somebody trying to transfer their experience or belief to you. When they tell you something you yourself want to believe in, that’s when you have to be most skeptical of all.”

This goes for the technologies we use as well. “You don’t need to understand the technical details of how generative AI works,” Ashton says, “but it helps to keep in mind who made them and why. The fact that a model like ChatGPT is available for free should inform how you assess the stories it tells you.”

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