Nels Abbey

Well, since this profession has gone up in smoke, I might have to resort to the oldest profession, so we'll find out how I fare in there.

It could work in multiple ways.

If you go back in certain African societies where they have the oral tradition to convey information verbally from one generation to another, as opposed to handwriting, but then we tend to lose quite a lot of information.

where there's no agreed mechanism of recording something, you end up with pretty much the strong ruling of the day.

So whoever can actually convey authority in their information or their institutional memory will be deemed to be the authoritative method of actually retaining that information.

But additionally, too,

I'll give you an example.

I'm British Nigerian, and I learned how to cook principally from my dad.

My dad learned how to cook from his mum.

What was interesting about it is that none of them ever owned a cookbook.

So what was actually happening was that how you actually learned to cook was subject to the actual ethnic group you came from.

There were different mechanisms on doing different things.

You might arrive at the same dish, but there might be different ways of actually cooking because that's part of the lineage of how it's actually taught.

Before we learn to write, we learn to tell stories.

And I think that one muscle gets a little bit weaker, the other gets a little bit stronger because you're using it increasingly more.

And I think that returning to storytellers via paintings, via pictures, our artists who have somewhat been neglecting in recent times will have a little bit more value to us.

And with the death of AI, too, we'll find ourselves returning to the guy at the back of the class drawing comics all day long.

Exactly what I was thinking.

Or she becomes a hero.

So there we go.