Before the Unavoidable Transformation from AI: Finding Nigeria's Historiography and Digital History in the Cyber Age

Abstract

This analysis sets the stage for the imminent torrent of scholarship on the ramifications of artificial intelligence (AI) for the entirety of Nigeria History; ramifications whose exhaustive assessment is for now considered premature. The present study consequently examines how technologies, media devices and associated-features of the digital age have transformed, are shaping and are perhaps undermining the nature and study of Nigeria’s past. It explores how the philosophy and writing of Nigerian history have responded to the influences of the forces, technologies, media and other underlying drivers of the digital age, particularly before the recent and rapidly evolving ascendency of the ongoing previously unseen disruptive of chatbots that are the major attributes of AI.