Journalism has a context. Before one can consider the future of journalism, one has to know something about the context – the setting of our future Earth. And while some aspects of the future are unknown, a number of dramatic changes are known with near certainty. The climate is entering into a period with no historical precedent. There is no near-term way to reverse the climate disruption being caused by the ever-rising amount of carbon in our atmosphere. Climate change will not be a story, but a setting: new and ever-changing rules of daily and seasonal life that will form the backdrop of everything that happens. One of the most evident consequences will be hundreds of millions of climate refugees—even in rich nations—with both international and regional borders hardened accordingly. In parallel to these climate-related changes, the quality of algorithmically generated text and videos will continue to advance. For any rapidly quantifiable task, deep-learning algorithms can quickly learn to outperform any human.
TopIntroduction
In his classic science fiction novel Foundation, Issac Asimov (1951) imagined a scientific advance that would be the envy of any journalist: the science of “psychohistory”, in which the general structure of large-scale future events could be mathematically predicted with near certainty. Asimov postulated that even though individual human decisions were unpredictable, with a large enough population a statistical analysis could still compute essential future trends -- so long as the population did not know about the prediction, which Asimov assumed would void the calculation.
Leaving aside the plausibility of psychohistory, it's not hard to see the allure of such predictive power, especially through the lens of journalism. Foreknowledge about developments thirty years from now would of course highlight the most important subtle trends happening today, trends in crucial need of documentation and analysis. And if mere knowledge about the future can change the sweep of history, then such journalism could have enormous influence, feeding back into the calculations in a way that could steer us towards preferrable outcomes. With this in mind, it's really too bad that psychohistory is entirely fictitious, that a modern understanding of chaos theory means that Asimov's idea is entirely unworkable.
Or is it?
As it turns out, there are at least two large-scale future trends that are indeed entirely predictable, with dramatic consequences for not only journalism, but humanity itself. Just as Asimov envisioned, the key to this predictability is the sheer number of human choices, much in the same way that the random motions of a large number of molecules can still result in perfectly predictable thermodynamic behavior. And, as Asimov also foresaw, the feedback factor is crucial: knowledge of what is coming can at least in part steer us onto a different path.
For these reasons, Journalism is going to shape, and be shaped by, two essential trends that are bearing down on us with all the inevitability of a mathematical calculation: Our planet will become less hospitable, and our choices will become more subject to automated and external manipulation. The first issue is that of climate change, which is coming at us faster and stronger than most people have internalized. The second issue relates to deep learning algorithms and artificial intelligence, and how auto-generated content is going to become all but unavoidable.
But humanity is nothing if not adaptable, and there is no doubt that we will make adaptations to these changes. Indeed, the nature of this adaptation remains one of the greatest uncertainties. Maybe we will respond to auto-generated content by retreating into tribalized information communities, unaware of what is going on outside our tribes and unable to engage with the best responses to the unfolding climate catastrophe. Or maybe we will adapt by learning to tune out the automated din, engage with the physical world, and intentionally transform our planet for the better. Which future will come to pass is truly uncertain, but will largely depend on factual journalism, and how it will be used to inform, connect and motivate humanity.