The future of media is less media

AI agents may be the future of media

I try to stick to the practical and operational, but I listened to Brian Morrissey’s Rebooting podcast yesterday, and it inspired me to go on a wild flight of fancy and predict the future.

If you’re not already, you should listen to the Rebooting podcast and the people vs. algorithms podcast. Links below.

Back to the topic. Think for a moment about the trajectory of media consumption. For example, compare what you did yesterday to what you did five, ten, or twenty years ago.

Twenty years ago, you might have read a morning newspaper on your way to work, and then you were mostly insulated from news (as you did your job) until lunch. You may have read the paper again at lunch, and then you got back to work. In the evening, you might have watched the news on TV.

Between then and now, these horrible spy devices have taken over our lives, and yesterday you probably turned off the alarm on your smart phone and immediately started reading your news feed, checked your email, looked at your social media notifications, then read a message on WhatsApp.

You worked on a desktop or laptop computer, which has its own distractions, while your smartphone was buzzing in your pocket.

In other words, your day was filled with media distractions. And you’ve become psychologically dependent on them. If you don’t check your smartphone every ten minutes or so, you probably feel nervous, and you almost panic if you can’t find the thing.

Here’s my prediction: this trend can’t continue. We can’t keep increasing how much time we spend on media, and we’re never going to reach a point where every waking moment is spent consuming media. In fact, we already know this is bad for us, and like the drunk who keeps telling himself to quit drinking so much, eventually we’re going to come to a breaking point. We’ll admit to ourselves that it’s unhealthy and we’ll start dialing it back.

If that prediction is true, the future will see us consuming less media.

How will that happen?

We’ll probably use AI agents – that is, in this context, routines that we can program to go out and collect the things we want, and bring it back and present it to us in the format we prefer.

Some time in the near future we’ll realize that our obsession with our smartphones is killing us, and we’ll set reasonable limits on our daily media consumption. But at the same time, we’ll have amazing AI-powered tools that will increase the efficiency of the time we do spend. For example, we won’t waste as much time scrolling through things we don’t care about.

Our AI assistant will know exactly what we care about, and it will also know what limits we want to place on our daily addiction.

Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that we realize our daily dose of media should be no more than 2 hours. We’ll program our AI agents to feed us 2 hours worth of content per day.

We won’t be doom scrolling. We won’t be paging through feeds of garbage, looking for the nugget we find interesting. Everything our AI agent feeds us will be interesting.

Now let’s imagine what that vision of the future portends for publishers.

Subscriptions will change radically. The reader won’t want everything from brand X, but only topic 1 in brand X, along with topic 1 in brands Y and Z. This will require a re-thinking of traditional subscription models.

Content creation will be focused on increasingly narrow demographics. Articles about topic 1 won’t be for general audiences, but for specific types of people who are interested in topic 1.

Although it’s also possible that the content creators will simply provide a kind of fact sheet that the AI agent will use to format the content the way each individual reader wants it.

Maybe you want Tom Hanks to read you your news, and maybe I want to have a dialog with the Star Trek computer.

In any event, I think it’s certain that things can’t keep going on the current trajectory. So spend some time imagining what the future of media might be, and then ask yourself what threats and opportunities you can see in that future.

Resources

The Rebooting Show
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rebooting-show/id1595625177

People vs. Algorithms
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/people-vs-algorithms/id1642958293