Despite the best wishes of futurists, visionaries and my Aunty Dot, we're still a long way from having computers fully run the media machine. We're still a long, long, long way from a media Skynet, because it would take a full-blown artificial intelligence that could piss all over the Turing Test to replace the most average human online editor.
Look, the ideal of a technology that filters and curates the news - without any human foibles and bias, and just looks at the cold, hard analytics to put everything in the right place - is a nice ideal, but is just not happening anytime soon.
Facebook took some tentative steps in this direction last year, with their news feed going full automatic for a while, and the biggest media organisation on the planet quickly discovered a big problem. While the automatic system was grunty as fuck, it couldn't differentiate between proper news and absolute horseshit, and served up its readers a hearty dish of the horseshit, including desperately dumb conspiracy theories and trashy celebrity bollocks. When it comes to actual news judgement, there are cats and dogs that are smarter than analytics-based software.
But even when we do reach that stage, and the Hal 9000 is serving up some perfectly tailored news stories to go with your morning protein pill, it's all built on the assumption that the technology won't fuck up, and won't make mistakes like messy humans.
Which is just fucking bizarre, because technology doesn't work like that. It fucks out all the time. Even the simplest basic computer programme can do bizarre things, and hardware shits itself for no goddamn reason. That's what technology fucking does.
The media has, in general, been fucking awful at keeping up with technological changes. The internet was a long time coming, and there was still a mad scramble and fumbles at the dawn of the internet age which was just embarrassing, and still devastating for the media scene.
It has also been fucking amazing – you can now get the latest news instantly on your fucking phone, wherever you are, with video and photos and all that jazz. Reporters can file from the field with a huge amount of information. It's all connected and fascinating and useful.
But there still needs to be the human touch, somewhere there in the process - the idea of a human eye that can spot when something is wrong, and react instantly, because it is so obvious, in a way a programme would never understand.
Still, with all the great new technology over the past few decades, the greatest and most useful bit of tech a reporter can have is still a pen and a pad, because it doesn't run out of batteries, operates in all sorts of conditions and never starts automatically updating just when you need to check a name. And there is still nothing that beats shouting across a newsroom as the best and fastest form of communication technology in the galaxy, with a speed that shits on your wi-fi link. Sometimes the old ways are still best.
- Katherine Grant
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