I love paradox. And unexpected consequences (which are often paradoxical). They are some of my favourite things, having spent much of my writing career critiquing psychologically naïve, linear modelling about economies and businesses, such as the notion of the human as an inanimate resource or the economy as something you can model and predict. Paradox and unexpected consequences are as inevitable a part of human society as greed, corruption and frivolous entertainment shows.

My favourite current observation of paradox is how, in the world of the web, social media and artificial intelligence (a misnomer in the case of large language models: algorithmic sentence machines are not intelligent, though they are powerful tools) some of the most thriving business sectors are the very oldest forms of human connection: meeting in person to hear stories, listen to music or watch sport.

When I was young, quite a long time ago, if I wanted to see my football team, or go to an England cricket test match, I just had to pitch up on the day, pay a couple of quid and gain entry. Now, I have to purchase a ticket in advance, as much as a year, in the case of a test match at Headingley, or queue online and then enter a ballot.

The owners of my team, Leeds United, are investing in a stadium upgrade, taking capacity from 37,700 to 56,000, having found that, even with the club in the second tier for two seasons, there was a waiting list of 20,000 for a season ticket. On the opening day of the season this year, Tottenham Hotspur attracted 61,000 fans. This is three times the average home attendance of the club in the mid-1980s, when ticket prices were much cheaper, even allowing for inflation.

Back in the day, there was no trouble getting a ticket to Glastonbury—or the even cooler festivals like Torhout or Knebworth. Now Glastonbury sells out in a few minutes.

There is the same story with literary festivals. There used to be just a few dozen: Hay, Cheltenham, Edinburgh and so on. Now practically every town and even a few villages will set one up. I was a co-founder of the Ampthill Literary Festival in Bedfordshire in 2014. Within just two years we had hundreds of people attending. It’s a tiny town.

I wouldn’t know how to go about the analysis, but it’s a near-certainty that £1,000 invested 20 years ago in live music event specialists and stadium construction companies and their favourite architects would have earned you more than the same amount invested in manufacturers of virtual reality headsets.

It amuses me that, nearly 20 years after the smartphone was released, the tech bros still don’t understand why it’s been so popular.

It connects people. Virtual reality cuts you off.

AI is disrupting literature. Some early drafts of articles and chapters are sometimes written using large language models. This is not a practice I recommend, and relying solely on this opens you to legal risk, given the propensity to hallucinations and basic factual errors, but we professional authors have to acknowledge the development. The phrasing from an LLM is unlikely be original, and less likely to engage at an emotional level, but using them may become common. It may well be the case that we ghostwriters will be employed at times as development editors to convert a draft generated by an algorithmic sentence machine into something original and engaging, but we will still be needed.

Meanwhile, the demand for in-person meetings, including story-telling, looks set to grow, and grow, and grow. I was intrigued by an academic paper on anthropology and evolution a few years ago that posited that story-telling preceded language: we developed words and sentences in order to convey the stories we had an urge to tell, and that a more accurate term for our species than homo sapiens was homo narrans.

The researcher, Francesco Ferretti, wrote in 2016, in a paper called The Social Brain is Not Enough:

‘In storytelling nestle the properties that have allowed humans to develop a very different kind of communication from that used by other animals… Narrative abilities precede language.’

Whichever came first, language or stories, it is clear that the practice of story-telling began tens of thousands of years ago, at least, with humans gathering in caves around a story-teller. And this oldest form of human entertainment and information-sharing is becoming one of the business success stories of the 2020s. Well, not in caves, maybe.

The more AI there will be, the more we will yearn for human interaction.