Do androids dream of print magazines?

AS I WRITE this I’m winging my way to New York City to visit Watson. Not Mr Watson or Ms Watson – just Watson, the IBM super computer. Fresh from crushing humans in Jeopardy, Watson is now crunching algorithms for health, science, business and other benign purposes. At least one of those purposes is making me, and probably you, redundant. Soon Watson and his ilk will be driving your car, diagnosing your diseases, searching case law, writing news stories, serving food, predicting your death (for insurance purposes only), reffing games and issuing traffic tickets. These things are all in play now. So are ‘care-bots’, friendly robotic animals for the elderly; medi-bots, such as Baxter, the robotic surgeon; and ‘sex-bots’ for, um, cuddles.

I don’t like sounding like a Luddite but I’m a bit worried about the rise of the machines. 40 million jobs are at stake in the next decade in the USA alone, reckons one group of academics. That’s a lot of disruption and angry Trump voters just there. I’m also worried about what machines are doing to us. The new field of empathy research finds that machines, especially smartphones, rob us of the capacity to feel others’ pain. Hence the rise in cyber-bullying, internet trolling and hate-speak.

It’s ironic that we’re losing empathy just at the time we need it. We know machines and AI will soon do many of the things humans do. But the one thing we don’t want machines to do is to love. Unless you’re a psycho, you want affection, warmth, understanding and love from humans, not humanoids.

As the stories on pages 66 and 112 discuss, finding the role of the human inside the machine is a looming challenge. Capitalism is a relentless march towards efficiency so the logic of the machine economy will roll on. But what I hope is that ‘being human’ becomes the most valuable commodity of all.

The alternative looks a bit like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. And no one should be made to dress like that. Vincent Heeringa Publisher-at-large SPEAKING OF the unceasing, uncaring march of the machines, Idealog is, like most modern media organisations, being forced to evolve in the digital era. We love making magazines. And, as evidenced by the constant stream of awards we’ve won over the years, we do it pretty well. But the market doesn’t love them quite as much as we do. So, in the spirit of all good innovators, we’re pivoting (or, as we prefer to say, pirouetting).

Like all our magazines, this one was a labour of love. And we will sniff it vigorously and clutch it to our chests when it arrives on our desk. But as well as the financial cost of creating it, there is also a major opportunity cost. The demands of a regular print deadline have hindered us from fully embracing online publishing and trying to deliver stories in different, more appealing, more innovative ways, whether through podcasts, online video, data visualisations or events.

Idealog.co.nz has a much bigger audience online than the magazine does in print. And it’s no secret that print advertising revenue in business media is much harder to come by these days. So we’re adapting to what the audience and the advertisers want, rather than trying to retrofit those demands into an increasingly antiquated, self-imposed publishing cycle.

This doesn’t mean we’re giving up on print. It will continue to play an important role in our business. But it will become more tactical, more beautiful, more thematic and more aligned to certain high-points around the year. And rather than begging for advertising to fill up the pages in a media property we publish regularly, we see an opportunity to work more closely with clients and use our editorial skills to produce media for them, on their terms.

We’ll still be focusing on creative business, innovation and entrepreneurialism, just as we have for over ten years. Our mission statement – to support and bolster New Zealand’s knowledge economy – won’t change. But the way that mission statement comes to life will. Ben Fahy Editorial director/publisher