It seems the issue of AI eating the world might be addressed a bite at a time for each area of society.
AI should begin eating the world of mainstream journalism (niche journalism is different).
The news media is in decline due to loss of trust by the public, and yet they've avoided fixing what most people view as a poor quality product. How many industries get away with this? AI can help. This page I ran into https://FixJournalism.com has a good image to illustrate "AI Nudged To Neutral" , image also in tweet:
and explores detail, and notes the absurdity of the news industry. Of course it notes there are more than two viewpoints:
'A study by Gallup and the Knight Foundation found that in 2020 only 26% of Americans reported a favorable opinion of the news media, and that they were very concerned about the rising level of political bias. In the 1970s around 70% of Americans trusted the news media “a great deal” or a “fair amount”, which dropped to 34% this year, with one study reporting US trust in news media was at the bottom of the 46 countries studied. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that newspaper publisher’s revenue fell 52% from 2002 to 2020 due to factors like the internet and dissatisfaction with the product.
A journalist explained in a Washington Post column that she stopped reading news, noting that research shows she was not alone in her choice. News media in this country is widely viewed as providing a flawed product in general. Reuters Institute reported that 42% of Americans either sometimes or often actively avoid the news, higher than 30 other countries with media that manage to better attract customers. In most industries poor consumer satisfaction leads companies to improve their products to avoid losing market share. When they do not do so quickly enough, new competitors arise to seize the market opening with better products.
An entrepreneur who was a pioneer of the early commercial internet and is now a venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen, observed, the news industry has not behaved like most rational industries: “This is precisely what the existing media industry is not doing; the product is now virtually indistinguishable by publisher, and most media companies are suffering financially in exactly the way you’d expect..” The news industry collectively has not figured out how to respond to obvious incentives to improve their products. '
Is the claim about software eating the world really as profound as it seems?
I mean, compare to the claim that written language eats the world. Since the invention of written language we've turned almost every task into one that involves written language in some way. And while that was a profound shift I'm not sure there is any insight to apply there.
Or, to put the point differently, is there anything more here than the fact that computation is cheap and useful so why wouldn't we involve it in many aspects of endeavor. Not sure it implies anything beyond that.
I could’ve read a much longer article on this.
It seems the issue of AI eating the world might be addressed a bite at a time for each area of society.
AI should begin eating the world of mainstream journalism (niche journalism is different).
The news media is in decline due to loss of trust by the public, and yet they've avoided fixing what most people view as a poor quality product. How many industries get away with this? AI can help. This page I ran into https://FixJournalism.com has a good image to illustrate "AI Nudged To Neutral" , image also in tweet:
https://twitter.com/BigIllusionBook/status/1661954976980299776
and explores detail, and notes the absurdity of the news industry. Of course it notes there are more than two viewpoints:
'A study by Gallup and the Knight Foundation found that in 2020 only 26% of Americans reported a favorable opinion of the news media, and that they were very concerned about the rising level of political bias. In the 1970s around 70% of Americans trusted the news media “a great deal” or a “fair amount”, which dropped to 34% this year, with one study reporting US trust in news media was at the bottom of the 46 countries studied. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that newspaper publisher’s revenue fell 52% from 2002 to 2020 due to factors like the internet and dissatisfaction with the product.
A journalist explained in a Washington Post column that she stopped reading news, noting that research shows she was not alone in her choice. News media in this country is widely viewed as providing a flawed product in general. Reuters Institute reported that 42% of Americans either sometimes or often actively avoid the news, higher than 30 other countries with media that manage to better attract customers. In most industries poor consumer satisfaction leads companies to improve their products to avoid losing market share. When they do not do so quickly enough, new competitors arise to seize the market opening with better products.
An entrepreneur who was a pioneer of the early commercial internet and is now a venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen, observed, the news industry has not behaved like most rational industries: “This is precisely what the existing media industry is not doing; the product is now virtually indistinguishable by publisher, and most media companies are suffering financially in exactly the way you’d expect..” The news industry collectively has not figured out how to respond to obvious incentives to improve their products. '
Is the claim about software eating the world really as profound as it seems?
I mean, compare to the claim that written language eats the world. Since the invention of written language we've turned almost every task into one that involves written language in some way. And while that was a profound shift I'm not sure there is any insight to apply there.
Or, to put the point differently, is there anything more here than the fact that computation is cheap and useful so why wouldn't we involve it in many aspects of endeavor. Not sure it implies anything beyond that.