Questionable primate biographies

I had an amusing interaction with an employment agent recently, who had asked for a description of what I'd been doing over the last year or so. I replied in an email, giving what I thought was a fairly lucid account of my recent activities and projects. The agent replied saying that this description was "insufficiently business-like", and that I needed to inject certain fictional elements into my account "to make it more credible".  The more credible account is one where I have a much higher degree of personal freedom and agency than is really the case - a version of life with the ego dial turned up to eleven.

This little episode highlighted to me the desire of people to create and dwell within a semi-fictitious narrative, and that often a good story is preferred to an accurate story. We all do it of course, but some autobiographies can be more fictitious - or more consciously fictitious - than others.

A recognition of this kind of phenomena goes back a long way, but a nice recent example of the desire to live within a particular narrative, and the various deceptions and absurdities which result from that, is given in the story of Cheeta the chimp.  The Cheeta story is amusing on several levels.  It highlights the plight of animals living in the human world, the desire of humans to both deceive others and be deceived, the concept of nostalgia as a saleable commodity, the extreme lengths which humans will go to in order to obtain and assemble a storyline and the anthropomorphisation of the lives of non-human creatures.

Also this narrative generating ability - even if it has only the most capricious relationship to the data - I think will turn out to be a central feature of the construction of an artificial intelligence.  The ability to answer the question "what did you do yesterday?" in a coherent manner, and to have an ongoing personal history is something which AI systems to date don't seem to have addressed, and certainly I've seen nothing along those lines in robotics so far.  It's about assembling a mind, and then being able to have a theory of other minds too which is roughly based upon yours.