“Now let’s try Macbeth,” Winston said. He opened up a written version of Macbeth, translated from Shakespearean language to simple English. Gone were the quotations and metaphors; the summarized storyline had been shrunk to about one hundred sentences and included only the character types and the sequence of events. In just a few seconds Genesis read the summary and then presented us with a visualization of the story. Winston calls such visualizations “elaboration graphs.” At the top were some twenty boxes containing information such as “Lady Macbeth is Macbeth’s wife” and “Macbeth murders Duncan.” Below that were lines connecting to other boxes, connecting explicit and inferred elements of the story. What did Genesis think Macbeth was about? “Pyrrhic victory and revenge,” it told us. None of these words appeared in the text of the story. Winston went back to a main navigation page and clicked on a box called “self-story.” Now we saw, in a window called “Introspection,” the process of Genesis’s own understanding of the story, the sequence of its reasoning and inference. “I think that’s cool because Genesis is a program that is in some respects self-aware,” he said.
Building complex story understanding in machines could help us create better models for education, political systems, medicine, and urban planning. Imagine, for example, a machine that possessed not just a few dozen rules by which to understand a text but thousands of rules that it could apply to a text hundreds of pages long. Imagine such a machine employed by the FBI, given an intractable murder case with puzzling evidence and a multitude of potential perpetrators. Or inside the Situation Room, offering American diplomats and military intelligence its own analysis of the motives of Russian hackers or Chinese belligerence in the South China Sea, calculating predictions for future behavior based on an analysis of a hundred years of history.
Winston and his students have used Genesis to analyze a 2007 cyberwar between Estonia and Russia. They have also found creative ways to test its intelligence, prompting it to tell stories itself, or tweaking its perspective to read a story from different psychological profiles—Asian vs. European, for example. One of Winston’s graduate students gave Genesis the ability to teach and persuade readers. For example, the student requested that Genesis make the woodcutter look good in the story of Hansel and Gretel. Genesis responded by adding sentences that emphasized the character’s virtuousness.
Recently, Winston’s students found a way to give Genesis schizophrenia. “We think some aspects of schizophrenia are the consequence of fundamentally broken story systems,” explained Winston. He showed me a cartoon illustration. It depicted a little girl trying to open a door handle that is too high to reach, and then fetching an umbrella. A healthy person would infer the girl is getting the umbrella to extend her reach and open the door; a person with schizophrenia does what is called hyperpresumption—inferring that the girl is getting an umbrella to go outside in the rain. To get Genesis to think like a schizophrenic in this way, Winston and his students simply switched two lines of code in the program. They put Genesis’s search for explanations that tie story elements together after the search for the default answer, the one that the girl will be going into the rain. Hyperpresumption, according to Genesis, is a dysfunction of sequencing in the brain. They called it the Faulty Story Mechanism Corollary.
* * *
One of Winston’s students at MIT was Wolfgang Victor Hayden Yarlott, an engineering and computer science major who graduated in 2014 and is now doing a PhD at Florida International University. Yarlott is a Crow Indian and had an idea: if Winston was correct about the Strong Story Hypothesis, that stories are a key part of human intelligence, Genesis needed to demonstrate that it understood stories from all cultures, including indigenous cultures such as the Crow. “Stories are how intelligence and knowledge is represented and passed down from generation to generation—an inability to understand any culture’s stories means that either the hypotheses are wrong or the Genesis system needs more work,” Yarlott wrote in his thesis.
Yarlott chose a set of five Crow stories for Genesis to read, including creation myths that he’d heard during his childhood in southern Montana. His challenge was to create recognition in Genesis of chains of events that seemed unrelated, of supernatural concepts like medicine (which has a magiclike quality in Crow folklore), and of the “trickster” personality traits. Those are all elements in the Crow stories that, as Yarlott determined, distinguish them from the canon of English-European storytelling. The creation myth “Old Man Coyote Makes the World” features animals that communicate with Old Man Coyote just as people do. As Yarlott points out, there is an amazing display of power or medicine that enables Old Man Coyote to create—but there are explicitly unknowable events that take place as part of the story, like, “How he did this, no-one can imagine.” To solve these issues Yarlott had to give Genesis new concept patterns to recognize. For example,
Start description of “Creation”.
XX and YY are entities.
YY’s not existing leads to XX’s creating YY.
The end.
Start description of “Successful trickster”.
XX is a person.
YY is an entity.
XX’s wanting to fool YY leads to XX’s fooling YY.
The end.
Start description of “Vision Quest”.
XX is a person.
YY is a place.
XX’s traveling to YY leads to XX’s having a vision.
The end.
The stories that Yarlott told to Genesis read like this:
Start experiment.
Note that “Old Man Coyote” is a name.
Note that “Little_Duck” is a name.
Note that “Big_Duck” is a name.
Note that “Cirape” is a name.
Insert file Crow commonsense knowledge.
Insert file Crow reflective knowledge.
“Trickster” is a kind of personality trait.
Start story titled “Old Man Coyote Makes the World”.
Old Man Coyote is a person.
Little_Duck is a duck.
Big_Duck is a duck.
Cirape is a coyote.
Mud is an object.
“the tradition of wife stealing” is a thing.
Old Man Coyote saw emptiness because the world didn’t exist.
Old Man Coyote doesn’t want emptiness.
Old Man Coyote tries to get rid of emptiness.
Yarlott found that Genesis was capable of making dozens of inferences about the story and several discoveries too. It triggered concept patterns for ideas that weren’t explicitly stated in the story, recognizing the themes of violated belief, origin story, medicine man, and creation. It seemed to comprehend the elements of Crow literature, from unknowable events to the concept of medicine to the uniform treatment of all beings and the idea of differences as a source of strength. “I believe this is a solid step towards showing both that Genesis is capable of handling stories from Crow literature,” he surmised, “and that Genesis is a global system for story understanding, regardless of the culture the stories come from.”
Genesis has obvious shortcomings: so far it only understands elementary language stripped of metaphor, dialogue, complex expression, and quotation. To grow its capacity for understanding, Genesis needs more concept patterns—in other words, more teaching. How many thousands of stories does a child hear, create, and read as she grows into adulthood? Perhaps hundreds of thousands.
But there are probably fundamental limitations to the machine’s potential. One rainy day in November I went to see Winston teach his extremely popular undergraduate course at MIT, “Intro to Artificial Intelligence.” I listened to him explain the Strong Story Hypothesis to hundreds of students and demonstrate its abilities. “Can Watson do this?” he quipped. But then he posed a series of questions to his young students casting doubt on his own invention.
“Can we think without language?”
The room was quiet.
“Well, we know
from those whose language cortex is gone that they can’t read or speak or understand spoken language,” he explained. “Are they stupid? They can still play chess, do arithmetic, find hiding places, process music. Even if the external language apparatus is blown away, I think they still have inner language.”
He paused. “Can we think without a body?”
Quiet.
“What does Genesis know about love if it doesn’t have a hormonal system?” he said. “What does it know about dying if it doesn’t have a body that rots? Can it still be intelligent?”
He paused again. “We’ll leave that part of the story for another time.”
Love and death, I marveled, as students filed out of the lecture hall. The stuff of the most epic stories on earth. What could Genesis understand of these universal human conditions without embodiment in time and space?
PART TWO
AUSTRALIA
SUPERNOMADS
Wherever I went in Australia, I wondered if the road I traveled on followed a Dreaming track—the network of Aboriginal trade routes and cultural thruways that crisscrosses the whole of the continent like a noospheric highway system. In Aboriginal cosmology, the Dreaming is a period of history during which their ancestors took animal forms and created the topography of the land by traveling and leaving behind tracks in the earth. The features of the land are the evidence of their journeys and are also called story-strings or songlines. Dreaming tracks aren’t etched on the land. They live in the memories of individuals who inherited the routes from the previous generations, who inherited them as well, creating one of the oldest chains of human memory in history. Driving at seventy miles per hour along the concrete roads of Australia’s modern landscape, I wondered whether I was treading on the routes of individuals who had walked this way to get to families, ceremonies, trade fairs, harvests, or sacred sites. What stories and songs had helped them remember the way to go?
Before contact with European colonizers, Dreaming tracks were conduits for informational exchange between different Aboriginal nations and communities. One community might have part of the story that runs to the border of their territory, and that story continues on into another territory. In other words, stories are instruments by which the history, geography, and laws of a group and other groups can be learned and shared orally. Anthropologists recorded Aboriginal people who knew about the intricate tribal relationships of those living over a thousand miles away. A single epic story could cross languages: the Fire Story connects the people of Wangkangurru and Wangkamadla with the Diamantina and Georgina Rivers and then the Arrernte people. In 2012, Putuparri Tom Lawford, a lawman of the Wangkajunga people, described as part of an oral history project how storylines link people in the desert. “Well some other tribes, some storyline or songline they cut through that tribe and through other tribes too,” he said. “You know this songline comes from that area, through this area, cuts through and finishes in this mob area here. That song itself will tell you. When they are singing a song, it’s a story, it will tell you how far it comes from this tribe to another tribe. And that is the good thing about all Western Desert people, is that we got the one songline that follows on. Even though we come from different parts of the Great Sandy Desert.”
When British ships arrived in 1788, the cartography of colonization and Dreaming tracks began to overlap. Western explorers and stockmen used Aboriginal scouts and their knowledge of the landscape and watering sites to lead the “charge into the spatial geography of the new lands.” As a result, new roads often followed the Aboriginal trading pathways, and even some railways were created alongside Dreaming tracks. Today, parts of highways in the Bunya Mountains in Queensland overlap with the Euahlayi people’s star maps, sequences of stars in the night sky whose appearance represents waypoints for the traveler to follow along a route. A stretch of the Victoria Highway in the Northern Territory follows along a Dreaming track of the Wardaman people. Most famously, the Canning Stock Route, a thousand-mile passage through the Western Desert that crosses some fifteen different Aboriginal language groups, overlays and intersects with myriad Dreaming routes.
The history of the Canning Stock Route also encapsulates the horrors of European brutality toward Aboriginal people and the galactic differences in how the two cultures approached geography. For Aboriginal people, “the whole Western desert is criss-crossed with the meandering tracks of ancestral beings,” wrote social anthropologist Ronald Berndt, “mostly though not invariably following the known permanent and impermanent waterhole routes.” In the early 1900s Alfred Canning decided to create a route to bring beef cattle to market across the same desert, forging a lucrative economic artery through the country. He knew that the endeavor was doomed without Aboriginal knowledge of water soaks and springs to sustain animals and their masters. So he forced the Aboriginal scouts, men by the names of Charlie, Gabbi, Bandicoot, Politician, Bungarra, Smiler, Sandow, and Tommy, to give up their knowledge by taking them hostage. Canning used neck chains and handcuffs so that the scouts couldn’t escape, and in the day he fed them salted beef in order to increase their thirst for fresh water. Each time they entered new country and encountered a member of a different group, Canning would “try and get him before we let the other go. Then the native we had would speak to the new one. They will come in willingly with another native. We would then get him as soon as possible to draw a plan on the ground of the different waters.”
At each of these sites, Canning later built a well, deepening the soaks and springs and building walls down into the earth. What he likely didn’t know or care about was that the sites—and the entire landscape he traveled through—had been created by his scouts’ Aboriginal ancestors back in the Dreamtime. There are few aspects of Australia that the ancestors are not responsible for; they created rivers, waterholes, rocks, valleys, and hills. Most features have a story associated with their creation, told in song during religious ceremonies and travel. As the anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose has described, the Dreaming is forever and exists everywhere; it cannot be changed or washed away with time. “The earth is the repository of blood from Dreaming deaths and births, sexual excretions from Dreaming activities, charcoal and ashes from their fires,” she writes in Dingo Makes Us Human. “Dreaming life has this quality which defies change: those things which come from Dreaming—country, boundaries, Law, relationships, the conditions of human life—endure.”
One drawing by a Martu elder of the Canning Route shows songlines on an east-west axis intersecting the route at every stage. “There are wells on the Canning Stock Route but they are people’s water,” explains Lawford. “And in a way Alfred Canning, he trespassed onto people’s land, Country. He took over their waters for animals, to feed cattle.… Well the Canning Stock Route, it broke the Country up.”
The Dreaming is not easy for non-Aboriginal people to conceptually grasp. Explanations in English often sound oxymoronic (it is in the past but has no end, for instance), or like the romantic imaginings of New Age primitivists. The word “Dreaming” is merely adequate at communicating its substance; it was first used in the nineteenth century by a postmaster and ethnologist in Alice Springs, Francis Gillen, and was later popularized by the biologist and anthropologist Walter Baldwin Spencer. Gillen was trying to translate an Arrernte word pertaining to reality and religion. In 1956, anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner attempted to coin a different word, the “everywhen,” but “Dreaming” is the word that stuck. Robyn Davidson, who famously traveled across the Australian desert by camel as a young woman, has called the Dreaming the original “theory of everything,” but one that she never could fully comprehend. “No matter how much I read about the Dreaming, the confidence that I understand it never quite takes root in my mind,” she wrote in an essay about twenty-first-century nomads. “To me it is on a par with, say, quantum mechanics, or string theory—ideas you think you grasp until you have to explain them.” Despite this, Davidson sums it up as “a spiritual realm which saturates the visible world with me
aning; that it is the matrix of being; that it was the time of creation; that it is a parallel universe which may be contacted via the ritual performance of song, dance and painting; that it is a network of stories of mythological heroes—the forerunners and creators of contemporary man.”
The reason I went to Australia was to understand whether Dreaming tracks were a mnemonic device for wayfinding. To me it seemed that Dreaming tracks and their song-cycles are literal directions for a traveler to follow. Aboriginal people seemed to have created cultural traditions that took advantage of the human mind’s narrative proclivities. By associating stories with specific places and encoding navigation information within the sequences of songs or stories, they made it easier to recall them through reciting these oral maps. This strategy is not unlike the Greek memory palaces, except Aboriginal people treated the landscape as a memory palace rather than inventing imaginary ones. As David Turnbull writes in his book Maps Are Territories, “Thus the landscape, knowledge, story, song, graphic representation and social relations all mutually interact, forming one cohesive knowledge network. In this sense, given that knowledge and landscape both structure and constitute each other, the map metaphor is entirely apposite. The landscape and knowledge are one as maps, all are constituted through spatial connectivity.”
* * *
Until the 1960s, it was widely accepted in anthropology that the Australian continent had been inhabited for a mere ten thousand years, less than both North and South America. In the 1990s anthropologists began reexamining ancient skeletal remains, and with improved dating techniques they discovered that the first Australians arrived on the continent at least forty thousand and perhaps as long as seventy thousand years ago. The first Australians were likely a founding population of around a thousand that would have arrived in small groups by boats from the north, possibly Timor or New Guinea, which was at one point separated from Australia by as little as fifty-five miles of ocean. The archaeologist Scott Cane describes this early history of ancient Aboriginal people in his book First Footprints; how their arrival on the continent coincided with an explosion of human migration around the globe, and in just over three thousand years, humans occupied every continent from Africa to Australia. By around fifty thousand years ago, humans had reached central southeast Australia, and by forty-four thousand years ago had reached Tasmania (once connected to the mainland by an ice bridge). Cane refers to these early settlers as “super-nomads,” a people equipped with endurance, physical skill, precise navigation abilities, and, he ventures, an encyclopedic knowledge of nature. By the time the first European colonizers “discovered” Australia in the seventeenth century, there were some 250 languages spoken there and a population of perhaps a million people. The origin stories told by many Aboriginal groups are similar to those that geneticists have reconstructed from DNA samples: the first landing occurred in the north and spread downward across the continent. In many stories, this is described as a mother emerging from the ocean and onto dry land. In some she carried a dilly bag full of babies and a walking stick, and as she traveled she planted babies in the land and made holes with her stick that filled with water.
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