At the heart of it all is a narrative of inevitability: AI is the future; AI will take our jobs; conscious AI is coming, like it or not. This narrative of inevitability is shaping funding, policy, research agendas and all sorts of other decisions. However, this is just a narrative, just a story. And it’s a story we don’t have to accept.

It’s time to be more intentional about using machine metaphors for machines and telling better stories about humans.

Through descriptive language, music, sounds and images, stories engage our senses and our embodied thinking. They combine emotion, factual information and various forms of tacit knowledge, often in deceptively simple ways.