Posts Tagged ‘Technology’
“They are strange times, times of beginnings and endings. Dangerous and powerful. And we feel it even if we don’t know what it is.”*…
Back in 2019, (R)D considered a piece from the remarkable Freeman Dyson on what the biotech revolution could mean (itself further to thoughts in an earlier piece of his). Those thoughts popped back into my mind when I read Quentin Hardy‘s recent recounting of his lunch with a friend…
We’re at an outdoor table in Mission Bay, the wet tech hotspot of San Francisco, home to Biopharma, Biotech, and Techbio research labs, known and emerging, plus big hospitals and research outfits.
Across from my salad and his sandwich, Ashlee sweeps his arm in a big arc across Long Bridge Street, towards all the residential and mixed-use buildings.
“There’s dozens of tiny labs up there,” he says, “somebody’s got a mouse, they’re doing something – growing organs, playing with neurons, injecting them with a virus to change their genetics. All kinds of weird shit. It’s wild, man.”
“All kinds of weird shit” and Ashlee have been intimates for years. They have been good to each other. We met around the time computers started moving from the closet to the cloud, and we both wrote about dirt-cheap satellites, and how cell phone guts were ending up in strange places, changing our world with cheap drones and voluminous data. Back when everything really started changing.
I went to Google to write about how those really big data sets and massive amounts of cloud computation were enabling Artificial Intelligence. Ashlee wrote the first biography of Elon Musk, which took him into Musk’s interests in non-governmental rocketry and neural implants. For many years Bloomberg paid him to do a show called Hello World, where he covered Doomsday preppers, fake meat, Nigerian hackers, and all kinds of strange things. All the creative journalists were jealous of him, not least because they couldn’t touch his talent for finding and admiring this abundance of exotic invention.
He now has his own show, Core Memory, which has unsurpassed reporting on all sorts of cutting-edge robotics, life reprogrammers, amateur space stations, body hackers, and new materials manufacturers. Highly recommended.
Back to his current interests. “I know this guy who’s harvesting rat neurons,” he says, “he talks about using them to power data centers.”…
… We start talking about biohacking and self-medication, all the people shooting up peptides, and the places around town where the kids are mixing their AI with their biohacking, and all the quasi-legal stuff people are doing, growing new human and animal parts.
On one level, they’re just following the “lots of data, lots of compute” model, only into the infinitely more complex wet world. Just as enough people posted tagged photos online to enable Fei Fei Li to make and exploit ImageNet, a major milestone in the creation of image-recognition AI, so these new hackers hope to tag, track, remix and scan enough biological data to remake biological understanding. And capability.
I’ve got my kale and he’s got his meat, partly liberated from the bread. Some of the fun in hanging out with Ashlee is the way we can free-associate over years of covering this kind of stuff, knowing that some things blow up and some things don’t work out, good ideas go down while the mad and the lucky are proclaimed geniuses. In other words, we get to bullshit about the weird shit.
“Maybe it’s going to turn into some kind of ghost gun thing, where people take drugs and perform genetic procedures that are legal on their own and turn it into some kind of illegal treatment,” I say. “You’ll go on a luxury cruise into international waters to get your genetic makeup altered, or blend two different animals into a third. Like ‘The Floating Offshore Platform of Dr. Moreau,’” after the H.G. Wells’ story about a mad scientist making human-animal hybrids…
… But we’re also talking about Biology, that most intimate and complex of sciences, being colonized by a trend we’ve seen elsewhere in tech for years: Prices fall far enough to change the rules of access, newcomers hack the system in defiance of the old standards and business models. Oceans of new data turn up, changing the entire process of understanding.
We’ve seen it happen in enough places to know the pattern. Open source Linux, cheap and attractive enough for all kinds of people to improve it for free, wiped out the old computer server industry. WiFi was open source too, so the price was right and interest surged.
The tech doesn’t have to be open source, or free, either. Economic cycles play a part. When the Internet bubble burst, space companies like Iridium and Globalstar, Rotary Rocket and Kistler, crashed. Lots of cheap talent and parts hit the market, which enabled Elon to do Space X. I once did a story about how entertainment in Africa changed after the price of satellite dishes fell below $200, and the tech moved from expatriate compounds to local bars.
The cost of biological experimentation is on a far crazier decline, giving Ashlee a lot of material. Twenty-three years after the first human genome was sequenced at a cost of $2.7 billion, a “complete genetic engineering home lab,” with a refurbished DNA sequencing machine and a “Bioengineering 101 Course” can be yours for $2500. Neurotechnology tools are available for sale or rent, so you can try neural implants at home. China is spinning up dozens of brain-computer interface startups.
“They’ve got a city in China that’s just doing brain technology stuff,” says Ashlee. When I lived in Asia 30 years ago, cities in China were famous for specializing in things like athletic socks and bras, wiping out the competition worldwide by cranking out more stuff more cheaply than anyone else. Now that the abundance of data and the cheapness of commute have kicked off the AI revolution, they have turned to brain tech. I pick at my kale.
Of course, just because the prices are a fraction of what they used to be, and these new hackers are descending on San Francisco, Cambridge, Miami, and who knows where else, it doesn’t mean breakthroughs are at hand. Biology is a lot more complex than electronics – a lot. Perhaps even more important, the new AI technology that people hope will enable all kinds of bio breakthroughs requires enormous amounts of data. The data set has to be huge, it has to be gathered in a single place the AI can access, and perhaps most critically of all, it has to be standardized to the highest quality…
… The biohackers face a big quality issue too. The Nobel Prize-winning protein information made use of some of the cleanest data possible, and Waymo came out of Alphabet’s cutting-edge sensor- and data-analysis labs. The guy in some converted Apartment 3G doing the thing with the iguana liver, the woman in the co-working space with the rat pituitary, they’re probably not going to bring the same magic.
“Yeah, but they’re not the only ones doing this,” says Ashlee. “I just had on Jennifer Doudna.” Doudna, who won a Nobel prize for her work on gene editing, now runs the Innovative Genomics Institute, a place rigorously pursuing this knowledge following traditional standards. She makes a couple of excellent points in Ashlee’s interview. She thinks a lot of the gunslinger biohackers will find biology much more complex and problematic than they think. At the same time, she expects a lot of the regulatory hurdles to new ways of doing things will become familiar over time, lowering the steps and costs of bringing out new drugs and treatments.
These lower costs will make more things possible, and attract more innovation. This will drive crazy a health and insurance industry built around high costs. If history is any guide, the incumbents won’t surrender their high-cost businesses without a fight. That may be one reason why Doudna thinks that big genetic alterations, will show up in agriculture first…
… Which, apparently, at this point isn’t weird enough. “I’ve got to catch up with this university researcher I met at a party,” he says, pushing away his plate. “She’s working on transplanting the personality of one animal, like a dolphin, to another, like a cow.”
“You mean, like you get a cow that wants to body surf in the wake of a tourist boat?”
He nods. “I know. Weird shit, right?”
I barely know what to do with this one, but I’m still in my “Dr. Moreau” zone.
“So maybe someday, instead of capital punishment, a convicted murder will receive the personality of a Labrador Retriever?”“Could be,” he says. “Who knows what people do with this stuff.”
“Has there ever been a time when people were creating a future this weird, when people were going to live in ways they couldn’t even recognize?”
“I dunno,” he says. “Explorer times?”
“I mean yeah, maybe for the Aztecs at first, when they saw the Conquistadors on their horses and thought it was some new kind of hybrid god/animal. But pretty soon the Spanish guys got off their horses and just started messing up the city and killing people. Pretty much like the Aztecs had been doing for a couple of generations. Business as usual.”
“I feel you,” he says. “Hey, I got to go. There’s some guys in Argentina who have this satellite and space tug that went off course. It’s like 50 million kilometers from Earth, but they think they can bring it back.” Weird stuff…
Biohacking in SF, where Dr. Moreau’s a piker, & humanoid robots are a happy delusion. Eminently worth reading in full: “Kale Salad with Ash.”
For more on the dizzying pace of experimentation (this time, in AI), pair with “Agent Claw.”
[Image above: source]
* “At such times the universe gets a little closer to us. They are strange times, times of beginnings and endings. Dangerous and powerful. And we feel it even if we don’t know what it is. These times are not necessarily good, and not necessarily bad. In fact, what they are depends on what we are.” – Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
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As we FAFO, we might recall that it was on this date in 1897 that the Indiana State House of Representatives passed Bill No.246 which gave pi the exact value of 3.2– a nice, round– and wrong– number.
Hoosier Dr. Edwin J. Goodwin, M.D, a mathematics enthusiast, satisfied himself that he’d succeeded in “squaring the circle.” Hoping to share with his home state the fame that would surely be forthcoming, Dr. Goodwin drafted legislation that would make Indiana the first to declare the value of pi as law, and convinced Representative Taylor I. Record, a farmer and lumber merchant, to introduce it. As an incentive, Dr. Goodwin, who planned to copyright his “discovery,” offered in the bill to make it available to Indiana textbooks at no cost.
It seems likely that few members of the House understood the bill (many said so during the debate), crammed as it was with 19th century mathematical jargon. Indeed, as Peter Beckmann wrote in his History of Pi, the bill contained “hair-raising statements which not only contradict elementary geometry, but also appear to contradict each other.” (Full text of the bill here.) Still, it sailed through the House.
As it happened, Professor Clarence Abiathar Waldo, the head of the Purdue University Mathematics Department and author of a book titled Manual of Descriptive Geometry, was in the Statehouse lobbying for the University’s budget appropriation as the final debate and vote were underway. He was astonished to find the General Assembly debating mathematical legislation. Naturally, he listened in… and he was horrified.
On February 11 the legislation was introduced in the Senate and referred to the Committee on Temperance, which reported the bill favorably the next day, and sent it to the Senate floor for debate.
But Professor Waldo had “coached” (as he later put it) a number of key Senators on the bill, so this time its reception was different. According to an Indianapolis News report of February 13,
…the bill was brought up and made fun of. The Senators made bad puns about it, ridiculed it and laughed over it. The fun lasted half an hour. Senator Hubbell said that it was not meet for the Senate, which was costing the State $250 a day, to waste its time in such frivolity. He said that in reading the leading newspapers of Chicago and the East, he found that the Indiana State Legislature had laid itself open to ridicule by the action already taken on the bill. He thought consideration of such a propostion was not dignified or worthy of the Senate. He moved the indefinite postponement of the bill, and the motion carried.
As one watches state governments around the U.S. enacting similarly nonsensical, unscientific legislation (e.g., here… perhaps legislators went to school on this), one might be forgiven for wondering “Where’s Waldo?”
“To-day I think / Only with scents”*…
We’ve considered before smell, the unsung hero of the senses. Today, Kaja Šeruga explains how scientists using chemistry, archival records, and AI are reviving the aromas of old libraries, mummies and battlefields…
We often learn about the past visually — through oil paintings and sepia photographs, books and buildings, artifacts displayed behind glass. And sometimes we get to touch historical objects or listen to recordings. But rarely do we use our sense of smell — our oldest, most primal way of learning about the environment — to experience the distant past.
Without access to odor, “you lose that intimacy that smell brings to the interaction between us and objects,” saysanalytical chemist Matija Strlič. As lead scientist of the Heritage Science Laboratory at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and previously deputy director of the Institute for Sustainable Heritage at University College London, Strlič has devoted his career to interdisciplinary research in the field of heritage science. Much of his work focused on the preservation and reconstruction of culturally significant scents.
Reconstructed scents can enhance museum and gallery exhibits, says Inger Leemans, a cultural historian at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Smell can provide a more inviting entry point, especially for uninitiated visitors, because there’s far less formalized language for describing smell than for interpreting visual art or displays. Since there’s no “right way” of talking about scent, she says, “your own knowledge is as good as the others’.”
Despite their potential to enrich our understanding of history and art, smells are rarely conserved with the same care as buildings or archaeological artifacts. But a small group of researchers, including Strlič and Leemans, is trying to change that — combining chemistry, ethnography, history and other disciplines to document and preserve olfactory heritage…
Read on for the fascinating details: “Recreating the smells of history,” from @knowablemag.bsky.social.
* Edward Thomas, “Digging“
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As we take a whiff, we might recall that it was on this date in 1924 that Coco Chanel agreed with the Wertheimer brothers Pierre and Paul, directors of the perfume house Bourjois, to create a new corporate entity, Parfums Chanel, Its signature product was Chanel No. 5. She had been selling small quanitites of the scent in her boutique since 1921.
Traditionally, fragrances worn by women had fallen into two basic categories. Respectable women favored the essence of a single garden flower while sexually provocative indolic perfumes heavy with animal musk or jasmine were associated with women of the demi-monde. Chanel sought a new scent that would appeal to the flapper and celebrate the seemingly liberated feminine spirit of the 1920s. Her scent was formulated by chemist and perfumer Ernest Beaux, who designed an unprecedented olfactory architecture, a bouquet of 80 scents whose precious notes were blended with high proportions of aldehydes, organic compounds that carry a crisp, soapy, and floral citrusy scent. In late 1920, when presented with small glass vials containing sample scents numbered 1 to 5 and 20 to 24 for her assessment, she chose the fifth vial. Chanel told Beaux, “I present my dress collections on the fifth of May, the fifth month of the year and so we will let this sample number five keep the name it has already, it will bring good luck.”
The first promotion for Chanel No. 5 appeared in The New York Times on December 16, 1924– a small ad for Parfums Chanel announcing the Chanel line of fragrances available at Bonwit Teller, an upscale department store. The fragrance, of course, become a fave. An Andy Warhol subject and worn by everyone from Marilyn Monroe and Catherine Deneuve to Mad Men’s Peggy Olson, the perfume, is a foundational part of fragrance history… and still sells a bottle every 30 seconds.
“The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling”*…
The quote above, from Ambrose Bierce, was true enough until relatively recently. Business has embraced gaming. When the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, Americans, who had legally wagered less than $5 billion on sports annually. Last year, they bet $150 billion, most of it online (with the active involvement of leagues and the broadcasters who serve up their games). And now prediction markets are on the scene, widening the apperture for online casino-like wagering to include politics, the Golden Globe awards, the return of Jesus Christ and virtually anything else… which could be a problem.
Indeed, just this past week, Common Sense Media released a report on gambling by young boys that reveals (among other deeply concerning things) that 1 in 3 American boys ages 11-17 are gambling before they can vote. (Full report here.)
Gambling addiction has been an issue in the U.S. for decades. But with the onslaught of new ways to wager, the problem is surging. And as Benjamin Errett (observes in an amusing piece on “McGuffins“– objects, devices, or events necessary to plot and the motivation of characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself), it’s a particularly problematic problem…
There’s a compelling argument to be made that money is the true MacGuffin. George Ainslie [here], a psychiatrist and behavioural economist, makes that case in a very readable paper on addiction and regrettable choices. He gets right to the weird thing about gambling as a compulsive behaviour: Spending money for a chance of getting more money (with the likelihood of losing it) is illogically direct. (I too got stuck on this paradox in The Wit’s Guide to Gambling, and some part of my brain is still spinning on the roulette table.) If you simply must have cocaine or hot fudge sundaes or hot cocaine fudge sundaes, the immediate pleasure and later pain are in different modalities. And so Ainslie concludes that money is a MacGuffin because it’s “the object of a hedonic game that is justified by its instrumental believability but which is actually shaped by its production of satisfaction in its own right.” Ergo, capitalism is a Hitchcock movie….
– source
Ainsle’s essay, prepared for a conference on addiction, is eminently worth reading and pondering.
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As we turn our backs on baccarat, we might recall that it was on this date in 1960 that “Money (That’s What I Want)” by Barrett Strong entered the Billboard Hot 100. Written by Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford, the single was the first hit record by Gordy’s Motown Records (released on Motown’s Tamla label). The song peaked at #23 in April and was the only song recorded by Strong that reached the Hot 100, though Strong went on to write many of Motown’s biggest hits. It was, of course, covered by The Beatles, among many others.
And we might note that today is the first day of a “prefectly square” month…
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it”*…
Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI purveyor Anthropic, has recently published a long (nearly 20,000 word) essay on the risks of artificial intelligence that he fears: Will AI become autonomous (and if so, to what ends)? Will AI be used for destructive pursposes (e.g., war or terrorism)? Will AI allow one or a small number of “actors” (corporations or states) to seize power? Will AI cause economic disruption (mass unemployment, radically-concentrated wealth, disruption in capital flows)? Will AI indirect effects (on our societies and individual lives) be destabilizing? (Perhaps tellingly, he doesn’t explore the prospect of an economic crash on the back of an AI bubble, should one burst– but that might be considered an “indirect effect,” as AI development would likely continue, but in fewer hands [consolidation] and on the heels of destabilizing financial turbulence.)
The essay is worth reading. At the same time, as Matt Levine suggests, we might wonder why pieces like this come not from AI nay-sayers, but from those rushing to build it…
… in fact there seems to be a surprisingly strong positive correlation between noisily worrying about AI and being good at building AI. Probably the three most famous AI worriers in the world are Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk, who are also the chief executive officers of three of the biggest AI labs; they take time out from their busy schedules of warning about the risks of AI to raise money to build AI faster. And they seem to hire a lot of their best researchers from, you know, worrying-about-AI forums on the internet. You could have different models here too. “Worrying about AI demonstrates the curiosity and epistemic humility and care that make a good AI researcher,” maybe. Or “performatively worrying about AI is actually a perverse form of optimism about the power and imminence of AI, and we want those sorts of optimists.” I don’t know. It’s just a strange little empirical fact about modern workplace culture that I find delightful, though I suppose I’ll regret saying this when the robots enslave us.
Anyway if you run an AI lab and are trying to recruit the best researchers, you might promise them obvious perks like “the smartest colleagues” and “the most access to chips” and “$50 million,” but if you are creative you might promise the less obvious perks like “the most opportunities to raise red flags.” They love that…
– source
In any case, precaution and prudence in the pursuit of AI advances seems wise. But perhaps even more, Tim O’Reilly and Mike Loukides suggest, we’d profit from some disciplined foresight:
The market is betting that AI is an unprecedented technology breakthrough, valuing Sam Altman and Jensen Huang like demigods already astride the world. The slow progress of enterprise AI adoption from pilot to production, however, still suggests at least the possibility of a less earthshaking future. Which is right?
At O’Reilly, we don’t believe in predicting the future. But we do believe you can see signs of the future in the present. Every day, news items land, and if you read them with a kind of soft focus, they slowly add up. Trends are vectors with both a magnitude and a direction, and by watching a series of data points light up those vectors, you can see possible futures taking shape…
For AI in 2026 and beyond, we see two fundamentally different scenarios that have been competing for attention. Nearly every debate about AI, whether about jobs, about investment, about regulation, or about the shape of the economy to come, is really an argument about which of these scenarios is correct…
[Tim and Mike explore an “AGI is an economic singularity” scenario (see also here, here, and Amodei’s essay, linked above), then an “AI is a normal technology” future (see also here); they enumerate signs and indicators to track; then consider 10 “what if” questions in order to explore the implications of the scenarios, honing in one “robust” implications for each– answers that are smart whichever way the future breaks. They conclude…]
The future isn’t something that happens to us; it’s something we create. The most robust strategy of all is to stop asking “What will happen?” and start asking “What future do we want to build?”
As Alan Kay once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Don’t wait for the AI future to happen to you. Do what you can to shape it. Build the future you want to live in…
Read in full– the essay is filled with deep insight. Taking the long view: “What If? AI in 2026 and Beyond,” from @timoreilly.bsky.social and @mikeloukides.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy.
[Image above: source]
* Alan Kay
###
As we pave our own paths, we might send world-changing birthday greetings to a man who personified Alan’s injunction, Doug Engelbart; he was born on this date in 1925. An engineer and inventor who was a computing and internet pioneer, Doug is best remembered for his seminal work on human-computer interface issues, and for “the Mother of All Demos” in 1968, at which he demonstrated for the first time the computer mouse, hypertext, networked computers, and the earliest versions of graphical user interfaces… that’s to say, computing as we know it, and all that computing enables.
“The new media are not ways of relating to us the ‘real’ world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.”*…
There is a vortex of forces shaping the future of journalism. Censorship, both direct and indirect, is on the rise in the U.S. and around the world. Concentration of media ownership is homogenizing coverage and creating “news deserts.”
At the same time, new technology and new applications of that technology are reshaping the Fourth estate. The Reuters Institute at Oxford surveyed 280 digital leaders from 51 countries and territories to learn what they are seeing– and planning. From the Executive Summary…
We are still at the early stages of another big shift in technology (Generative AI) which threatens to upend the news industry by offering more efficient ways of accessing and distilling information at scale. At the same time, creators and influencers (humans) are driving a shift towards personality-led news, at the expense of media institutions that can often feel less relevant, less interesting, and less authentic. In 2026 the news media are likely to be further squeezed by these two powerful forces.
Understanding the impact of these trends, and working out how to combat them, will be high up the ‘to do list’ of media executives this year, despite the unevenly distributed pace of change across countries and demographics.
Existential challenges abound. Declining engagement for traditional media combined with low trust is leading many politicians, businessmen, and celebrities to conclude that they can bypass the media entirely, giving interviews instead to sympathetic podcasters or YouTubers. This Trump 2.0 playbook – now widely copied around the world – often comes bundled with a barrage of intimidating legal threats against publishers and continuing attempts to undermine trust by branding independent media and individual journalists as ‘fake news’. These narratives are finding fertile ground with audiences – especially younger ones – that prefer the convenience of accessing news from platforms, and have weaker connections with traditional news brands. Meanwhile search engines are turning into AI-driven answer engines, where content is surfaced in chat windows, raising fears that referral traffic for publishers could dry up, undermining existing and future business models.
Despite these difficulties many traditional news organisations remain optimistic about their own business – if not about journalism itself. Publishers will be focused this year on re-engineering their businesses for the age of AI, with more distinctive content and a more human face. They will also be looking beyond the article, investing more in multiple formats especially video and adjusting their content to make it more ‘liquid’ and therefore easier to reformat and personalise. At the same time, they’ll be continuing to work out how best to use Generative AI themselves across newsgathering, packaging, and distribution. It’s a delicate balancing act but one that – if they can pull it off – holds out the promise of greater efficiency and more relevant and engaging journalism.
These are the main findings from our industry survey:
- Only slightly more than a third (38%) of our sample of editors, CEOs, and digital executives say they are confident about the prospects for journalism in the year ahead – that’s 22pp lower than four years ago. Stated concerns relate to politically motivated attacks on journalism, loss of USAID money that previously supported independent media in many parts of the world, and significant declines in traffic to many online news sites.
- By contrast, around half (53%) say they are confident about their own business prospects, similar to last year’s figure. Upmarket subscription-based publishers with strong direct traffic can see a path to long-term profitability, even as those that remain dependent on advertising and print worry about sharp declines in revenue and the potential impact of AI powered search on the bottom line.
- Publishers expect traffic from search engines to decline by more than 40% over the next three years – not quite ‘Google Zero’ but a substantial impact none the less. Data sourced for this report from analytics provider Chartbeat shows that aggregate traffic to hundreds of news sites from Google search has already started to dip, with publishers that rely on lifestyle content saying they have been particularly affected by the roll out of Google’s AI overviews. This comes after substantial falls in referral traffic to news sites from Facebook (-43%) and X, formerly Twitter (-46%) over the last three years.
- In response, publishers say it will be important to focus on more original investigations and on the ground reporting (+91 percentage point difference between ‘more’ and ‘less’), contextual analysis and explanation (+82) and human stories (+72). By contrast, they plan to scale back service journalism (-42), evergreen content (-32), and general news (-38), which many expect to become commoditised by AI chatbots. At the same time, they think it will be important to invest in more video (+79) – including ‘watch tabs’ – more audio formats (+71) such as podcasts but a bit less in text output.
- In terms of off-platform strategies, YouTube will be the main focus for publishers this year with a net score of +74, up substantially on last year. Other video-led platforms such as TikTok (+56) and Instagram (+41) are also key priorities – along with working out how to navigate distribution through AI platforms (+61) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Perplexity. Google Discover remains a critical (+19), if slightly volatile, source of referral traffic, while some publishers are looking to find new audiences via newsletter platforms such as Substack (+8). By contrast, publishers will be deprioritising effort spent on old-style Google SEO (-25) – as well as traditional social networks Facebook (-23) and X (-52)
- Last year we predicted the emergence of ‘agentic AI’, but this year we can expect to start to see real-world impact of these more advanced technologies. Some sources suggest that there will soon be more bots than people reading publisher websites, as tools like Huxe and OpenAI’s Pulse offer personalised news briefings at scale. Three-quarters of our respondents (75%) expect ‘agentic tools’ to have a ‘large’ or ‘very large’ impact on the news industry in the near future.
- Alongside the traffic disruption from AI, news executives also see opportunities to build new revenue from licensing content (or a share of advertising revenue) within chatbots. Around a fifth (20%) of publisher respondents – mainly from upmarket news companies – expect future revenues to be substantial, with half (49%) saying that they expect a minor contribution. A further fifth (20%), mostly made up of local publishers, public broadcasters, or those from smaller countries, say they do not expect any income from AI deals.
- More widely, subscription and membership remain the biggest revenue focus (76%) for publishers, ahead of both display (68%) and native advertising (64%). Online and physical events (54%) are also becoming more important as part of a diversified revenue strategy. Reliance on philanthropic and foundation support (18%) has declined this year, after cuts of media support budgets in the United States and elsewhere.
- Meanwhile news organisations’ use of AI technologies continues to increase across all categories, with back-end automation considered ‘important’ this year by the vast majority (97%) of publisher respondents, many of whom integrated pilot systems into content management systems in the last year. Newsgathering cases (82%) are now the second most important, with faster coding and product development (81%) also gaining traction.
- Over four in ten (44%) survey respondents say that their newsroom AI initiatives are showing ‘promising’ results, but a similar proportion (42%) describe them as ‘limited’. Two-thirds of respondents (67%) say they have not saved any jobs so far as a result of AI efficiencies. Around one in seven (16%) say they have slightly reduced staff numbers but a further one in ten (9%) have added new roles/cost.
- The rise of news creators and influencers is a concern for publishers in two ways. More than two-thirds (70%) of our respondents are concerned that they are taking time and attention away from publisher content. Four in ten (39%) worry that they are at risk of losing top editorial talent to the creator ecosystem, which offers more control and potentially higher financial rewards.
- Responding to the increased competition and a shift of trust towards personalities, three-quarters (76%) of publisher respondents say they will be trying to get their staff to behave more like creators this year. Half (50%) said they would be partnering with creators to help distribute content, around a third (31%) said they would be hiring creators, for example to run their social media accounts. A further 28% are looking to set up creator studios and facilitate joint ventures.
More widely, could 2026 be the year when AI company stock valuations come down to earth with a bump, amid concerns about whether their trillion-dollar bets will pay back their investors? Meanwhile the amount of low-quality AI automated content, including so-called ‘pink slime’ sites, looks set to explode, with platforms struggling to distinguish this from legitimate news.
We can expect more public concern about the role of big tech in our lives. This may include individual acts of ‘Appstinence’ and other forms of digital detox and a desire for more IRL (In Real Life) connection. Governments will also come under pressure to do more to protect young and other vulnerable groups online, even in the United States.
The creator economy will continue to surge, fuelled by investments from video platforms and streamers. At the top end creators will look more like Hollywood moguls with big budgets and their own studio complexes. Within news, we’ll also see the emergence of bigger, more robust, creator-led companies delivering significant revenues as well as value to audiences – offering ever greater competition for traditional journalism…
Read the report in full: “Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2026,” from @reutersinstitute.bsky.social.
* Marshall McLuhan
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As we ponder the prospects of the press, we might type a birthday note to John Baskerville, a pioneering English printer and typefounder, who was born on this date in 1706. Among Baskerville’s publications in the British Museum’s collection are Aesop’s Fables (1761), the Bible (1763), and the works of Horace (1770)– many printed on a stock he invented, “wove paper”, which was considerably smoother than “laid paper”, allowing for sharper printing results. And as for his fonts, Baskerville’s creations (including the famous “Baskerville,” a predecessor to the very similar Times New Roman) were so successful that his competitors resorted to claims that they damaged the eyes.
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