Spring hunting was in full swing, they told me, and they’d seen their first goose. The sea ice was so smooth they rode across the bay on their snowmobiles at seventy miles per hour, practically flying. It was Sean’s twenty-first birthday; it had been a good day. Hunting was clearly the center of their lives. Both spoke with pride and reverence of learning to hunt from their relatives as children and talked about all the places and animals they’d seen. We pored over pictures on their smartphones. “Here’s my little brother with his first polar bear,” said Sean, pointing to a photo of a magnificent white bear with an expertly aimed, single bullet hole through its lungs. Sean’s brother was nine when he killed it. They showed me a picture of a baby seal on the ice looking at the camera with large, liquid black eyes. I felt a sudden pang of regret that it had been killed, which I admitted. “We’re taught never to disrespect animals. Ever,” Sean said.
We left our drinks for a moment to go outside in the cold, where young and old stood around smoking together, many in T-shirts despite the below-freezing air. “How do you guys find your way out there? Do you use GPS?” I asked. “No!” Sean said, surprised at the question. “We know our way.” He talked about using landmarks and sastrugi, of learning the routes from his dad. We went back inside, where they began to wax about the epic hunting feats of their friends in communities farther north like Arctic Bay and Grise Fiord, of a friend who sometimes drove his truck on sea ice and had once caught a beluga whale by the tail with his bare hands. The stories were full of youthful swagger and glory. When I left to walk home around midnight they were still drinking and celebrating. But the next morning, they were out hunting again, Sean with his new birthday gift: an anniversary-edition Ruger .22 to replace the rifle he’d hunted with since he was five years old. Back south in the United States I continued to follow their spring hunting travels on Facebook. “Done so much hunting in the last couple of months,” wrote Sean one day, “that I really do feel I’m home out there rather than in town.”
THE STORYTELLING COMPUTER
Our brains seem designed to conjure narratives from experience. And for eons, different cultures have used narrative sequence and story to transmit navigational knowledge. The anthropologist Michelle Scalise Sugiyama spent a year researching oral traditions of foraging societies and discovered how widespread this phenomenon is across the world. In her analysis of nearly three thousand stories from Africa, Australia, Asia, North America, and South America, she found that 86 percent contain topographic information—travel routes, landmarks, the locations of resources like water, game, plants, and campsites. She argues that the human mind—initially designed to encode space—found a way to transmit topographical information verbally by transforming it into social information in the form of stories. “Narrative serves as a vehicle for storing and transmitting information critical to survival and reproduction,” she reported. “The creation of landmarks by a human agent or agents in the course of a journey is a common motif in forager oral traditions.… By linking discrete landmarks, these tales in effect chart the region in which they take place, forming story maps.”
Examples of practices for creating story maps abound in Native American cultures from the Mojave to the Gitksan. In 1898 Franz Boas (who conducted his first anthropological fieldwork on Baffin Island) described a common feature of the stories of the Salish peoples, a character known as a “culture hero,” “transformer,” or “trickster” who gives the universe its shape through his travels and whose adventures are passed down through generations. A few years earlier, Richard Irving Dodge, an American colonel who spent thirty-four years in the American West, described an amazing capacity for memorizing orally transmitted topographical information among the Comanche in his 1883 book called Our Wild Indians. As a young boy, Dodge’s guide had been kidnapped and raised by Comanches, and he told Dodge that a few days before young men set out on a raid, an older man with knowledge of the country would assemble them for instruction. As Dodge recounts,
All being seated in a circle, a bundle of sticks was produced, marked with notches to represent the days. Commencing with the stick with one notch, an old man drew on the ground with his finger, a rude map illustrating the journey of the first day. The rivers, streams, hills, valleys, ravines, hidden water holes, were all indicated with reference to prominent and carefully described landmarks. When this was thoroughly understood, the stick representing the next day’s march was illustrated in the same way, and so on to the end. He further stated that he had known one party of young men and boys, the eldest not over nineteen, none of whom had ever been in Mexico, to start from the main camp on Brady’s Creek in Texas, and make a raid into Mexico as far as the city of Monterey, solely by memory of information represented and fixed in their minds by these sticks.
In her description of Pawnee migrations across the Midwest plains, anthropologist Gene Weltfish describes how each band followed a preferred route, some of which had few identifieable landmarks and were easy to get lost in. To successfully navigate, “the Pawnees had a detailed knowledge of every aspect of the land,” she wrote in The Lost Universe. “Its topography was in their minds like a series of vivid pictorial images, each a configuration where this or that event had happened in the past to make it memorable. This was especially true of the old men who had the richest store of knowledge in this respect.” Similarly, the cultural and linguistic anthropologist Keith Basso wrote in his book Wisdom Sits in Places that the Apache frequently cite the names of places in sequence, re-creating a journey. One day Basso was stringing barbed wire with two Apache cowboys when he heard one of them talking to himself quietly, reciting a list of place-names for nearly ten minutes straight. The cowboy told Basso that he “talked names” all the time, that it allowed him to “ride that way in my mind.” Basso, who spent decades studying the place-naming practices of the Western Apache people, called place-names “intricate little creations.” They are small words that do large tasks, one of which is to aid in navigation. For example, an Apache name like Tséé Biká Tú Yaahilíné translates to “Water Flows Down a Succession of Flat Rocks,” a literal description of the place itself.
In the Apache settlement of Cibecue, Basso mapped forty-five square miles and recorded 296 place-names. These “large numbers alone do not account for the high frequency with which place-names typically appear in Western Apache discourse,” he wrote. “In part, this pattern of recurrent use results from the fact that Apaches, who travel a great deal to and from their homes, regularly call on each other to describe their trips in detail. Almost invariably, and in marked contrast to comparable reports delivered by Anglos living at Cibecue, these descriptions focus as much on where events occurred as on the nature and consequences of the events themselves.” This binding of specific experiences to specific locations, which is an effective way to remember both pieces of information reciprocally, also occurs in Western Apache storytelling. Place-names are “situating devices” in stories. “Thus, instead of describing these settings discursively, an Apache storyteller can simply employ their names, and Apache listeners, whether they have visited the sites or not, are able to imagine in some detail how they might appear.”
Basso describes Western Apache culture as one in which storytelling, places, traveling, memory, and future imagining—all the elements involved in wayfinding—are the ingredients required for wisdom itself. One day Basso talked to Dudley Patterson, a horseman who lived in Cibecue, who tried to answer Basso’s question: What is wisdom? “Your life is like a trail. You must be watchful as you go,” Patterson told him.
Wherever you go there is some kind of danger waiting to happen. You must be able to see it before it happens.… If your mind is not smooth you will fail to see danger.… If you make your mind smooth, you will have a long life. Your trail will extend a long way. You will be prepared for danger wherever you go. You will see it in your mind before it happens. How will you walk along this trail of wisdom? Well, you will go to many places. You must look at them close
ly. You must remember all of them. Your relatives will talk to you about them. You must remember everything they tell you. You must think about it. You must do this because no one can help you but yourself. If you do this your mind will become smooth. It will become steady and resilient. You will stay away from trouble. You will walk a long way and live a long time. Wisdom sits in places. It’s like water that never dries up. You need to drink water to stay alive, don’t you? Well, you also need to drink from places. You must remember everything about them.
When I read Patterson’s words I felt how apt they were to all I had learned about the origins of the human mind in the practice of navigating across prehistoric landscapes, of our unique capacity to store memories and think in terms of stories. Life itself, I started to think, is a movement through time, the creation of a story of how we came to be here now and where we are going. It was much later that I came across the work of Patrick Henry Winston, a pioneer in artificial intelligence research who thinks that storytelling is so central to human intelligence, it is also the key to creating sentient machines in the future.
* * *
I met Winston at his second-floor office in the Stata Center on the MIT campus, a surreal 720,000-square-foot Alice in Wonderland building designed by Frank Gehry with walls and corners crashing into one another at sharp angles. Winston, white-haired and dressed casually, sat at his desk. Behind him was an assortment of books on the Civil War, of which he is an amateur scholar, but it was the painting above his head that caught my attention. It was a framed reproduction of Michelangelo’s fresco The Creation of Adam, depicting the moment just before genesis, the fingers of God and Adam hanging in the air, about to touch and set into motion the biblical story of man on earth.
Winston has been at MIT for most of his life; he was an undergraduate there, receiving a degree in 1965 in electrical engineering before doing a doctoral dissertation under the famous artificial intelligence researcher and philosopher Marvin Minsky. It was Winston who took over the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory when Minsky eventually moved on to create the influential Media Lab. “I do screwball AI,” Winston, now in his sixties, told me of his career. “My work is about developing a computational understanding of human intelligence rather than creating applied systems. Applied AI is about 95 percent of the field.” Within this niche of screwball AI, Winston has created a new computational theory for human intelligence. He believes that in order to evolve AI beyond systems that can simply win at chess or Jeopardy, to build systems that might actually begin to approach the intelligence of a human child, scientists must tackle one of the age-old questions of philosophy: identifying what it is exactly that makes humans so smart. Logos? Imagination? Reason? It was Alan Turing, Winston explained to me, who published the seminal paper Computer Machinery and Intelligence in 1950 that argued human intelligence was the result of complex symbolic reasoning. Minsky also believed that reasoning—the ability to think in a multiplicity of ways that are hierarchical—was what made humans human. Subsequent AI researchers argued that human intelligence is a matter of genetic algorithms, statistical methods, or replicating the neural net of the human brain. “I think Turing and Minsky were wrong,” said Winston, pausing. “We forgive them because they were smart and mathematicians, but like most mathematicians, they thought reasoning is the key, not the byproduct.”
“My belief is that the distinguishing characteristic of humanity is this keystone ability to have descriptions with which we construct stories,” he told me. “I think stories are what make us different from chimpanzees and Neanderthals. And if story understanding is really where it’s at, we can’t understand our intelligence until we understand that aspect of it.” Winston draws on linguistics, in particular a hypothesis developed by fellow MIT professors Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky, to explain how language evolved in humans. Their idea is that humans were the only species who evolved the cognitive ability to do something called “Merge.” This linguistic “operation” is when a person takes two elements from a conceptual system—say “ate” and “apples”—and merges them into a single new object, which can then be merged with another object—say “Patrick,” to form “Patrick ate apples”—and so on in an almost endlessly complex nesting of hierarchical concepts. This, they believe, is the central and universal characteristic of human language, present in almost everything we do. “We can construct these elaborate castles and stories in our head. No other animals do that,” said Berwick. The theory flips the common explanation of why language developed: not as a tool for interpersonal communication but as an instrument of internal thought. Language, they argue, is not sound with meaning but meaning with sound.
In their book on the subject, Why Only Us: Language and Evolution, Berwick and Chomsky draw on brain imaging studies that have shown how the prefrontal cortex—a region important for language processing—has evolved. They propose that through encephalization, the evolutionary expansion and reorganization of our brains, a novel anatomical loop between the posterior superior temporal cortex (STC) to Broca’s area (responsible for speech processing and coherent speech, respectively) was created. The maturation of these dorsal and ventral pathways in the brain’s language and premotor areas during childhood enables each of us to do the merge operation and have symbolic language. Indeed when researchers have looked at the circuits of our brains that activate when the merge function is occurring, the process takes place in four different connecting tracks. Newborn babies, interestingly, aren’t born with some of these connections in place, and studies show that, if this fiber tract in children is not fully matured between the posterior STC and Broca’s area, the interpretation of syntactically complex sentences is poor. “They don’t have the fat insulation, they’re not wired up,” suggested Berwick. “Over the course of a couple years [most children] are going to start talking, and that could be the result of a small evolutionary change. The brain gets bigger and the extra growth wired up these systems. The rest, they say, is history.”
For Winston, the merge hypothesis represents the best explanation so far for how humans developed story understanding. But Winston also believes that the ability to create narrative stems from spatial navigation. “I do think much of our understanding comes from the physical world, and that involves things moving through it,” he said. “The ability to put things in order, I think that comes out of spatial navigation. We benefit from many things that were already there, and sequencing was one of the things that was already there.… From an AI perspective, what merge gives you is the ability to build a symbolic description. We already had the ability to arrange things in sequences, and this new symbolic capability gave us the ability to have stories, listen to stories, tell stories, to combine two stories together to get a new story, to be creative.” Winston calls it the Strong Story Hypothesis.
* * *
Winston decided to see if he could create a program that could understand a story. Not just read or process a story but glean lessons from it, even communicate its own insights about the motivations of its protagonists. What were the most basic functions that would be needed to give a machine this ability, and what would they reveal about human computation? Winston and his team decided to call their machine Genesis. They started to think about commonsense rules it would need to function. The first rule they created was deduction—the ability to derive a conclusion by reasoning. “We knew about deduction but didn’t have anything else until we tried to create Genesis,” Winston told me. “So far we have learned we need seven kinds of rules to handle the stories.” For example, Genesis needs something they call the “censor rule” that means: if something is true, then something else can’t be true. For instance, if a character is dead, the person cannot become happy.
When given a story, Genesis creates what is called a representational foundation: a graph that breaks the story down and connects its pieces through classification threads and case frames and expresses properties like relations, actions, and sequences. Then Genesis uses a simple
search function to identify concept patterns that emerge from causal connections, in a sense reflecting on its first reading. Based on this process and the seven rule types, the program starts identifying themes and concepts that aren’t explicitly stated in the text of the story. What fascinated Winston initially was that Genesis required a relatively small set of rule types in order to successfully engage in story understanding at a level that appears to approach human understanding. “We once thought that we would need a whole lot of representations,” said Winston. “We now know that we can get away with just a few.”
“Would you like a demonstration?” he asked me. I rolled my chair around to the other side of his desk and watched as Winston opened the Genesis program. “Everything in Genesis is in English, the stories, the knowledge,” he said. He typed a sentence into a text window in the program: “A bird flew to a tree.” Below the text window I saw case frames listed. Genesis had identified the actor of the story as the bird, the action as fly, and the destination as tree. There was even a “trajectory” frame illustrating the sequence of action pictorially by showing an arrow hitting a vertical line. Then Winston changed the description to “A bird flew toward a tree.” Now the arrow stopped short of the line.
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