On May 12, Tech Leadership Conference 2016 brought authors, thinkers and researchers – like Robin Chase and Ray Kurzweil – to Waterloo, Ontario, to discuss their research into topics like AI, virtual and artificial reality, the sharing economy and much more.

Vidyard co-founder and CEO Michael Litt took the stage just before Kurzweil to deliver a "T minus 5" presentation on the history of how humans tell stories with technology. Litt begins his story 5,000 years ago with the world’s first broadcast device: a flat stone carved with symbols.

Litt traces the ways humans have used technology to broadcast stories from primitive beginnings to the era of the printing press, broadcast radio, and eventually the modern information age:


What’s comes next? Litt has a few ideas, informed by basic research into theoretical physics by his friends at Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario.