Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here. —Sue Monk Kidd, author I just had an awesome weekend with my sister visiting San Francisco from the east coast. She was attending a conference on education, as she teaches ASL to high school students in Delaware. I’ll spare you the details about her visit since this isn’t a personal blog, but I will share with you a conversation that was sparked from her telling me about a session she attended about storytelling. The Story of Who We Are Storytelling is inherent to the way our brains work. It is inherent in the way we learn, the ways we communicate, the way we make sense of the world. And it’s not just the written word—humans have been writing things down for only a few thousand years—there is evidence that humans have been communicating via story since the invention of language, which, some argue, helped define what homo sapiens actually are. Writing doesn’t define us, but storytelling does. Don’t believe me? Consider the following interchange: Person 1: Have you seen John? Person 2: I wasn’t going to say anything, but I saw a green VW parked in front of Carol’s house last night. We all know what is being implied here, but where does it say in that exchange that John is having an affair with Carol? Does the second sentence have anything to do with the first? Putting these two statements together in conversation opens up an entire novel of what is going down with John and Carol. We make stories out of everything, from giving our toys names when we are children to naming our new cars. We describe relationships with non-human things as easily as we describe relationships with our spouses. We talk to our cats and ask them about their day; we talk about our phones not liking the available wi-fi. We say that the beach is calling to us when we dream about a vacation. We anthropomorphize everything to explaining chemistry to how to balance your checkbook to putting together IKEA furniture to coding to — yes — even EDA. And to someone who teaches any of these disciplines, the mark of a good teacher is to tell a great story to their students (see: The Phil Kaufman Award Dinner, 2017 ). If you’re good at what you do, the students will take the story and make it their own, and run with whatever you’re trying to teach them. The Story of Predicting the Future Okay. So humans are storytellers. What does this have to do with this blog? In another bit of synchronicity, I was listening to this story on NPR yesterday morning. It’s a great bit of audio storytelling, I do recommend listening to it. For what it’s worth, though, I find the headline misleading. The story is not about ‘Black Mirror’ (which I also recommend!). The story is about the inability of innovators to truly grasp the implications of their inventions. To follow an innovation to its logical conclusion, we need science fiction writers. In the story, the author points out that it was a writer who came up with the term “cyberspace”. William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer , described the internet with remarkable prescience in 1984, without ever having logged in: A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. Even Mark Twain predicted the internet in 1898 in one of his science fiction stories, From the ‘London Times’ of 1904 , in which he wrote about an invention called the “telelectroscope”, which used the phone system to create a network of information-sharing. Hello, world-wide-web. There are so many examples of this. Mobile phones? From Star Trek, 1966. They even had iPads in The Next Generation . The moon landing? Jules Verne, 1865. Computers in every home? Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land in 1961. (He even predicted screensavers!) H. G. Wells predicted the atomic bomb in 1914, in his novel The World Set Free . 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) explored the obvious problems with AI, long before the term “AI” meant anything to anyone. I can barely think of any work of science fiction published before now that doesn’t have some kind of technology that we now have at our fingertips. The Story of System Design Now, I know that those people who read my blog may wonder how storytelling relates to what Cadence does. My answer is this: With Cadence making the tools to allow innovation to happen, we have the opportunity to nurture the storyteller in ourselves to imagine how those innovations play out. For us to help develop this exciting future, we need to mine that space just before sleep and allow our minds to wander to what these innovations may mean to future generations. Cadence is in the unique position of figuring out how to deliver design and verification tools to those customers who create these innovative systems. We have already implemented tools that can enable communication from the chip to package to board to system. We’ve only just begun, and there’s so much we can do to enable system design and make our customers much more productive. I can’t wait to see what our customers will come up within the next year. I’ll flat-out say the people who work at Cadence are among the smartest, most creative, and forward-thinking people I have ever met. I am constantly learning from every person I encounter. (They tell the best stories, it’s true.) It is imperative that we use that creativity and prescience to explore what these innovations may mean for the future of technology. While we at Cadence may not be making the actual drones or the VR goggles or autonomous automobiles (A 2 ) directly, our technologies are directly involved in their development, particularly in our Tensilica customizable processors and DSP IP . We need to tell the story of the future, to ensure that the future our children and grandchildren live in is more like idyllic and less dystopian. In doing so, we can become the thought leaders and innovators that the future will be demanding of us. —Meera P.S. Check out this interesting article from Scientific American about anthropomorphism and this fascinating article about Why Storytelling Is the Ultimate Weapon !![]()
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