This book makes a specific, perhaps unfashionable argument, that human storytelling, the real thing, not the text generation that mimics it, is the single cognitive ability that artificial intelligence cannot replicate. Not because the technology is insufficiently advanced. Not because we haven’t fed it enough data. But because storytelling, as practiced by living human beings, is not fundamentally a linguistic act. It is an embodied, social, mortal act. It requires a narrator who has skin in the game. A narrator who lives, feels and can die.

Storytelling, real storytelling, the kind that happens between present human beings, is the antidote to this loneliness. Not because it is pleasant, though it often is. Because it does something that no other form of communication can, it makes one person’s inner life available to another. It bridges the gap between subjective experiences that would otherwise remain forever sealed inside separate skulls. When you hear someone’s true story, you are no longer alone with your own. For the duration of the telling, two lives overlap. Two sets of fears rhyme. Two versions of hope converge.

Storytelling does something unique at its most fundamental level. It converts experience into agency. It takes what happened to you and transforms it into something you did, the act of telling. The passive becomes active. The suffered becomes the spoken. And in that transformation, something essential about human dignity is preserved.

Let’s understand storytelling in its purest form.