Technology is a tool not a solution

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that technology simply exists and nothing more. Omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, but also invisible, intractable and inevitable. Nothing to see here, just move along.

By ‘devil’ here, I mostly mean Silicon Valley, with its relentless, profit-driven fetish for unleashing an endless stream of new hardware, apps, and other digitally born innovations on a mostly willing but unwitting public.

And whatever. Good for them, I guess. The mission of a commercial business is to make and sell products at a profit. Mission accomplished.

But just because the Internet exists, and is omnipresent, does not make what Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and OpenAI have to offer the perfect solution for every use case. And journalism is a particularly special and difficult case.

News is the development and sharing of knowledge. It is by nature expensive and time-consuming to both produce and consume. That is an inconvenient truth, but to change that equation is to create something that is not news.

The essential components of journalism are in the relationship between reporter and reader: "I learn —> I share —> you learn." For journalism to work, those steps can not be eliminated, automated or otherwise optimized in attempt to remove human effort and inefficiencies from the job of knowledge creation and comprehension.

GenAI has value to news: monitoring and gathering information; producing and distributing content; and in its discovery by consumers. But AI can not synthesize insight, and we can not use it to summarize our way to an understanding of the world.

Technology is a useful tool, but there are no shortcuts to economic viability for journalism or to sense-making for readers.