Better Living through Storytelling

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One of the hardest parts of developing artificial intelligence, writes Frank Bures for Poets & Writers, is trying to teach computers causality: how and why one thing follows from another.

Humans don’t have to be taught:

We see causality constantly, incessantly, and effortlessly: when we read the news, when we gossip about neighbors, when we watch a movie or read a book….We are constantly cataloguing the story lines around us in an effort to sort out our own. What causes greatness? What causes failure? What causes happiness?

That’s why narrative is essential not just to fiction but also to our identities and even our survival. Read the rest here.

Lauren O'Neal is an editorial assistant at the Rumpus and an MFA student at San Francisco State University. Her writing has appeared in publications like Slate, The Hairpin, and Corium Magazine. You can follow her on Twitter at @laureneoneal. More from this author →