Seven months before ChatGPT launched, I spent two hours with Brian Boyd on a question that now feels urgent: why do humans tell stories at all?
Boyd is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Auckland, the world’s foremost Nabokov scholar, and author of On the Origin of Stories. His answer isn’t literary. It’s #evolution.
Story, he argues, is an adaptation. It lets us track cause and effect, sure. But it also does something stranger: it lets us explore the world not only as it is, but as it could be.
Now look at where we are. We’ve built machines that produce stories by the billion. Fluent, endless, cheap. But do they know which details matter and which to ignore? Do they grasp what happens next, and why? That puzzle has a name in #ArtificialIntelligence, the frame problem, and Boyd’s take on it surprised me.
We also went places I didn’t plan for. Heider and Simmel’s famous triangle film (watch it and try NOT to see a story). Why Boyd calls art “cognitive pattern play.” Religion as perhaps the most powerful #storytelling ever. And why social media is a misguided attempt to control our own story.
Then there’s Karl Popper, the giant of #philosophy of science whose biography Boyd was writing when we spoke. Where Popper lands on science, stories, and revolutions is worth the listen alone.
