The Next Big Idea The Story of Stories
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Mar 16, 2026 Kevin Ashton, technologist and author who coined “Internet of Things,” offers a brisk mini-history of storytelling tech. He walks from fireside talk to smartphones. He explores how new media reshape belief, how algorithms amplify extremes, and why photorealistic AI could blur story and reality. Short, sharp, and thought-provoking.
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Stories Have A Universal Shape
- Stories share a universal shape: character, chronology, consequence, mirrored in every language's subject-verb-object structure.
- Ashton frames stories as fractal: sentences (S-V-O) stack into longer narratives that give meaning and coherence.
Stories Create Meaning And Social Cohesion
- Stories provide meaning, coherence, bonding, and shared law in an indifferent universe.
- Ashton links stories to theory of mind, mating, nationalism, and religion as mechanisms that unify groups around shared narratives.
Reinforcement Learning Ratchets Extremes
- Reinforcement learning amplifies content that generates engagement, producing ratcheting effects toward more extreme material.
- Ashton ties Facebook's 2011 RL shift to rapid escalation into anti-Semitic and anti-vax content within days in experiments.
