Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
concocting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about
who we are. These strings or streams of narrative issue forth as if from a single
source - not just in the obvious physical sense of flowing from just one mouth,
or one pencil or pen, but in a more subtle sense: their effect on any audience
or readers is to encourage them to (try to) posit a unified agent whose words
they are, about whom they are: in short, to posit what I call a
center of narrative
gravity
.”
(Dennett 1989/91)
In this chapter I discussed the issue of narrative and story-telling from the per-
spective of primate social behavior and primate evolution, hoping that knowl-
edge of who we are (as a species and as an individual primate) helps us un-
derstand the broader context and significance of narrative in human life. A
more detailed discussion and analysis of the transactional format of narratives
in human and other animals is given in (Dautenhahn 2001).
Currently, a number of research project are devoted to building narra-
tive software, virtual or physical environments e.g. (Glos & Cassell 1997),
(Machado & Paiva 1999), (Umaschi-Bers & Cassell 1999), (Bobick et al. 1999),
(Montemayor et al. 2000), (Benford et al. 2000). Supporting, and possibly ex-
panding, human narrative intelligence is expected to impact human minds and
our notions of sociality and what we call our
selves
. In parallel, investigations
into autonomous story-telling agents might result in agents (robotic or soft-
ware) with genuine narrative minds, able to tell us interesting stories, listen to
and understand our stories, and make us laugh. As I argued in this chapter, the
kind of stories these agents will tell us will be shaped by the social field and the
cultural environment of human societies in which these agents
grow up
.Thus,
it is up to us whether the stories of the future will be nightmares, fairy-tales,
comedies or adventures.
Acknowledgements
The AURORA project is supported by EPSRC (GR/M62648),
Applied AI Sys-
tems Inc
., and the National Autistic Society (NAS). Thanks to the editors
Phoebe Sengers and Michael Mateas whose comments helped improving a
previous version of this chapter.
Notes
.
This chapter is partially based on (Dautenhahn 1999c).
