Why Storytelling Has Survived Every Technological Revolution

In 458 BCE, audiences at the Theatre of Dionysus watched actors descend from above the stage on mechanical cranes; gods arriving from the machine to resolve what mere mortals could not. The Greeks had invented a piece of stagecraft so useful, and so narratively satisfying, that the Latin phrase for it, deus ex machina, is still in common use today.

They were not using technology to replace the story but were using it to help tell the story better. The compulsion to make meaning through narrative, and to reach for whatever tool makes that meaning more vivid, more felt, more shared. That compulsion has not changed in three millennia, but the tools have changed, and continue to change.

So, Christopher Nolan's recent adaptation of The Odyssey, shot entirely on IMAX, arrives at the same moment that Pixar director Andrew Stanton is speaking publicly about what artificial intelligence means for artists. These are not marginal conversations happening at the edges of the industry. They are taking place at the frontier of cinema itself.

And sitting underneath both conversations is the same question that has driven storytelling since Homer: what does it mean to be human, and how do we tell each other about it?

The Medium of Storytelling Changes So The Story Survives.

A consistent pattern runs through the history of storytelling, and it is worth taking seriously as a predictive signal. New mediums do not destroy old ones, but they clarify them.

When cinema arrived, theatre did not disappear. It became more purely itself. When television arrived in our living rooms, cinema did not close its doors. It became the event, the communal ritual of leaving home to experience something larger than the domestic, and our TV shows became intimate parts of our personal lives for years. And when streaming services fractured the broadcast model, TV and films again adapted, and the theatrical experience became about scale, shared presence, and the things a screen in a bedroom cannot replicate.

But what fell away in each transition was not storytelling, but the gatekeeping structures built around it. The studio system, the network calendar, and the TV guide telling audiences what to watch and when to watch it. What has always endured is the human need to be inside a story, to be changed by it, to carry it forward.

The internet has not simply created a new medium. It has made it structurally possible, for the first time in history, to bypass the gatekeeper entirely. And not to fight it or petition it, but to route around it and build a direct relationship with an audience. The most significant creative careers of the next two decades will belong to people who understood this early. Not necessarily those who got signed by a studio, but those who built something genuine, and found the audience that was waiting for them.

Technology in Service of The Story, Not the Other Way Around

The most enduring creative technologies have never been built for their own sake. They have been built because storytellers reached the limits of what existing tools could do.

Pixar is perhaps the clearest modern example. When Steve Jobs purchased the Graphics Group from Lucasfilm in 1986, Pixar was not, first and foremost, a film studio. It was a technology company that happened to need to make films in order to prove what its technology could do. Toy Story required rendering software that did not yet exist. Finding Nemo required the simulation of underwater light and fluid dynamics at a level of complexity the industry had never attempted. Every film was, in part, an engineering problem. But the engineering was never the point. It existed entirely in service of the story being imagined.

That philosophy continues today. Andrew Stanton has said publicly that Pixar has always used machine learning in some form, if machine learning is understood as the automation of tasks that slow the artist down or that nobody particularly wants to do manually. The goal is not to replace the artist. It is to make it easier for the artist to be artistic, and to remove technical friction so that creative work can happen at its highest level.

That framing matters. It is fundamentally different from seeing AI as a replacement for creativity. It treats technology as an instrument, not an author. Throughout history, the tools that have endured are the ones that amplify human imagination rather than attempt to substitute for it.

What AI Can and Cannot Do in the Story Space

And there is a structural distinction worth holding clearly with that framing. AI, at its current architecture, can only recombine what already exists. It is extraordinarily capable within this range. It can be stylistically coherent, technically proficient, statistically plausible given the full corpus of what has come before. But it cannot reach beyond that envelope. It cannot access the state that artists describe when they talk about where their most significant work comes from; the place outside of logic, outside of pattern, where something genuinely new enters the world.

This is not a romantic claim about the mysticism of creativity, but it is an observation about what AI actually is. A system trained on everything that has ever been created can produce very good work within the boundaries of existing work. It cannot break those boundaries. And the works that break the envelope are the ones that change what storytelling is capable of.

So, the artists using AI most effectively are using it to handle the procedural, repetitive, and technically demanding parts of the process. To free up finite creative energy for the work that only they can do. That is a tool, and used well, it is a remarkable one. However, the danger is not AI itself but the confusion between amplifying genuine creative intelligence and routing around it. Those are different products with different implications, and the distinction matters enormously.

Science Fiction as a Rehearsal Space for the Future

From an anthropological perspective, one of the most underexamined aspects of entertainment is what it actually does inside a civilisation. Science fiction has always functioned as a rehearsal space, and a place where a culture tries on futures before they arrive. The scientists and engineers who built the technologies defining this era frequently cite specific films and books as the things that made them believe the work was worth doing. Science fiction does not just reflect the future. It participates in constructing it.

If entertainment is moving toward stories that explore consciousness, human potential, and what it means to be alive at this particular moment of civilisational acceleration, then the stories being told now are shaping what gets imagined as possible, what gets funded, and what gets built. The works that make people feel something true, that change how they see themselves or the world, are not culturally neutral. They are inputs into the future.

The medium is also shifting in ways that make this more consequential, not less. Immersive and participatory storytelling, with experiences where the distinction between watching a narrative and being inside one becomes genuinely meaningful, is not a distant possibility. It is an engineering problem currently being worked on by capable people, and we believe it is worth keeping an eye on. So, the question worth asking is not whether these tools will arrive. It is what stories will be chosen to tell through them, and whose voices will be doing the choosing.

The storytelling urge is not a feature of the modern creative economy. It is a feature of being human. The technology underneath it will keep changing. The thing it is trying to do will not.

We dive deeper into the future of movies in this podcast episode: