Stories Endure. Technology Helps.
Shakespeare & Company. Paris, France. November 18, 2016. Photo by Rishad Tobaccowala
Every advance in technology has empowered story tellers.
Fire brought warmth and as our ancestors huddled around the flames they told stories.
Just as we do today when gathered around a fire.
The wheel allowed humans to go on journeys and new people to arrive from elsewhere.
At its core every novel is driven by one or a combination of two factors :
Someone new comes to town or into our lives initiatiating a series of incidents.
Or
A protagonist goes on a journey of exploration. These journeys may be external in search of a person, place or adventure or it might be an internal exploration of self-understanding.
The Printing Press enabled us to access far more stories including the very best ones across time.
Every year I revisit my two favorite books which were written 500 years ago and possibly are the best novel and play of all time: Don Quixote and Hamlet.
The Internet turbocharged story telling by giving more people a voice, reducing barriers to distribution and creating new forms of story telling from blogs to short videos.
And now there is AI which I refer to as Alien Intelligence (credit Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft).
Will AI write stories for us versus humans writing stories?
Yes.
Will AI write humans out of future stories?
They might.
But the stories that will resonate the most among humans will be stories about us humans interacting with each other and possibly alien intelligence.
Because AI will never perfect the complexity of humans.
AI thinks in outcomes while humans are all about the journey.
AI thinks clearly and cleanly while humans are messy.
We do not answer questions with a “yes” or a “no” but a “maybe”, “it depends”, or we avoid the question all together.
A human is a bundle of complexity and the same person in a different mood is often a different person.
As Walt Whitman wrote:
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
In addition every human is aware of the finiteness of time which machines cannot feel.
From Louis MacNiece’s “Sunlight on the Garden”
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
Franz Kafka said “ the meaning of life is that it ends”
In fact it is our very messiness and awareness of the passing of time that may ensure our survival.
Humans do not compute.
We choose with our hearts and then use data to justify our choices.
And we live by stories.
Joan Didion wrote “ we tell ourselves stories in order to live”
And even in an agentic world we all have the agency to forge, invent and transform ourselves.
Nothing is written.
If you ever stop believing in the power of stories as the base DNA of being human, all you have to do is look in the mirror.
In the reflection there is a story.
One Single Thing.
A Lake in the Dolomites, Italy. June 6, 2026. Photograph by Rishad Tobaccowala.
The Layers by Stanley Kurtz (opening and closing stanza)
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.