What Are Stories?

What are stories? What is fiction?

These are questions I’ve been asking myself recently in the face of the avalanche of new AI technologies.

I’ve recently read, and was hugely inspired by, the historian/philosopher Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens – a Brief History of Humankind. You will often read blurbs on books that claim that “This book will change your life”. Well, I believe this is a life-changing book.

It has certainly made me reconsider my consumption of meat.

I remember, one late night, driving down the freeway and seeing a semitrailer stacked to the gunnels with crates. They looked like bread crates, no more than 20cm high, a few feet square, but they contained thousands of chickens.

They were confined within low, small crates, perhaps 10 or a dozen to each crate, and I remember thinking: they are driving this truck at night. They don’t want “us” to see this; sentient creatures, terrified, crammed in tiny crates, heading for an abattoir.

These are the tasty, herb-basted, herb-stuffed delicious dinners that we will take home on those nights when we haven’t planned ahead, when we’ve run out of ideas and time.

Sans heads, sans limbs, sans sentience. They bear no resemblance at all to the chickens of our imaginations, the proud rooster heralding the dawn, his little harem of wives scrabbling and scratching in the dust for worms and insects.

Harari’s book is not a polemic on the virtues of vegetarianism, but his reasoned, careful and beautifully articulated book maps our human story, from our hunter gathered origins where we shared the earth’s resources with our fellow sentient beings, through the cognitive revolution, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and now, the unfolding technological revolution.

He observes how we, Homo Sapiens, came to dominate the world, and to make subservient all the other creatures we share our world with.

Now, in the greatest of human ironies, perhaps with AI, we have engineered our own obsolescence.

We have created stories – fictions – to justify our dominance, and our cruelty. The Bible states that God gave us dominion over all the living creatures.

We’ve run with this, and with the rise of Capitalism, and its voracious and exponential appetite for profits, marched our fellow sentient beings along the production lines, corralled them into tiny enclosures and foetid, stinking pens to wade in their own excrement, removed infant mammals from their mothers to appropriate their milk.

Stories are the way we make sense of, and give meaning to our lives. The best authors articulate our experiences, they resonate because they speak our truths, some barely apprehended in the busy-ness of our frantic lives, or to offer visions of other, alternative worlds of the imagination.

We must find time to read, and to read with care and attention, so that we can be enriched by their insights and the generosity and genius of their imaginations.