The Robots Are Coming!

by Andres Oppenheimer

  THE END OF TELEVISION?

  For several years now, television has been losing audiences due to the migration of young people to the Internet. According to the specialized website MarketingCharts.com, Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four watched an average of twenty-four hours of broadcast and cable TV per week in 2011. But by 2016, that number had dropped to fifteen hours per week. The trend is clear: more and more young people are moving away from traditional television to Internet video platforms like YouTube, Netflix, Roku, Hulu, and HBO. Cable TV consumers are now opting for streaming services, which are cheaper and allow them to watch what they want, when they want it.

  Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, perhaps the world’s best-known media research center, told me in an interview that “TV as a delivery channel, as a distribution method, is on the way out.” But that doesn’t mean that the people who produce television content are going to disappear, he said. Far from it, there are growing numbers of made-for-TV movies and series being produced for Netflix and other online platforms. At the same time, television channels like HBO are increasingly moving toward the Internet. And the big broadcast and cable television networks are also quickly expanding their presence in social media and the web, he added.

  Like Wilson, Ito believes that the various news delivery forms are merging, and that the more trusted and accepted brands are the ones that will survive. “CNN is becoming stronger and stronger as a website,” Ito said. “All of the newspaper companies are starting to do video…The New York Times has the number one podcast out there, and that’s audio. I think, on the journalism side, radio, television, and print are really starting to converge. I don’t think that stand-alone television is really a thing anymore.”

  FEWER CAMERAMEN, SOUND ENGINEERS, AND TELEPROMPTER OPERATORS

  When I first started my TV talk show Oppenheimer Presenta around fifteen years ago, long before it moved to CNN en Español, I remember that we needed a crew of four cameramen, four camera assistants, several lighting technicians, a sound engineer, a teleprompter operator, and a number of other technicians to tape each show. The studio floor was flooded with people. Nowadays, like many TV anchors in the United States, I’m virtually alone on the studio floor. The cameras are robotic. They are handled remotely by a director who tells me, through my earpiece, which of the three cameras I should look at. The cameras move from left to right, and up and down, completely on their own, with no human being behind them. When the director tells me to start the show looking at camera one, I turn to camera one. When he tells me we’re cutting to camera two, I turn to camera two, and so on.

  In most U.S. TV studios, you’ll find no cameramen, no lighting technicians, no sound engineers, no floor managers. Often, there aren’t even teleprompter operators. For several years now, we television hosts have handled the teleprompter ourselves with a pedal on the floor: viewers can’t see it, but we press it with the tip of our foot, scrolling the text at the speed we want. Almost all the technical work has now been automated, and with the ever-growing audience for the homemade videos made by YouTubers, I expect this trend to increase.

  YOUTUBERS: THE NEW STARS OF THE SMALL SCREEN

  If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I never would have believed in the popularity of the so-called YouTubers. Until 2014, when I was on a book tour of Latin America to promote my book Innovate or Die!, I had never paid attention to YouTube shows. I didn’t have the faintest idea about how popular they were. All I’d ever seen on YouTube was an interview or maybe a video of a kitten playing the piano. So when I got the schedule for interviews my publisher had set up with major television stations and newspapers across the continent, I asked the Penguin Random House publicist to please cancel a particular interview with a Mexican news commentator/comedian who was listed as “Chumel Torres, YouTuber.” The schedule was too grinding that day, and I was already exhausted, I argued.

  The publicist looked at me, completely stunned. “Are you crazy?” she said. “This guy has more followers than anyone. Everyone watches his show, it’s the best!” she assured me. I asked some of my Mexican friends, and they confirmed that yes, Chumel Torres was indeed an Internet sensation in Mexico, especially among young people. I reluctantly agreed to do the interview. To my big surprise, not only had Torres read the book from cover to cover—something that many professional journalists who had interviewed me hadn’t done—but he turned out to be an excellent interviewer, coming up with some of the best questions I got on the tour. He is a young engineer who quit his job with a multinational company to team up with two friends—also young professionals—to start a fun, satirical political Trevor Noah–style show on YouTube. It soon became a hit. My publicist had been right all along. While the interviews in which I promoted my book with some of Mexico’s best-known TV journalists had gotten 4,000 or 5,000 hits on YouTube, the one with Chumel Torres reached nearly 400,000.

  PEWDIEPIE HAS 61.8 MILLION FOLLOWERS AND EARNED $15 MILLION IN ONE YEAR

  Shortly after that, at a gala for advertisers, YouTube president Susan Wojcicki made a bold announcement. “Today, I’m happy to announce that on mobile alone YouTube now reaches more eighteen- to forty-nine-year-olds than any network—broadcast or cable,” she boasted. “In fact, we reach more eighteen- to forty-nine-year-olds during primetime than the top ten TV shows combined.”

  Wojcicki’s figures were debatable because she was not specifying whether any YouTube program could reach the same audience as a network TV program and was not saying whether she was comparing puppy video audiences with those of the top ten TV shows. Still, YouTubers are drawing amazing crowds. The most successful YouTube star at the time of this writing is a Swede who goes by the name PewDiePie. He has over 61.8 million followers and earns around $15 million a year, according to Business Insider. Next on the list is Chile’s Germán Garmendia, who has 33.5 million followers and has annual earnings of $5.5 million, followed by Spain’s Rubén Doblas Gundersen, better known as ElRubiusOMG, with 28.4 million followers.

  JOURNALISM WILL BECOME A MORE COLLABORATIVE ART

  What will be the future of journalists? I asked the innovation chiefs of both The Washington Post and The New York Times. What advice would they give to young people thinking of entering the profession? Gilbert and Wilson agreed that there will always be a need for journalists—regardless of the media they use to reach their audience. Journalists will continue to investigate, interpret, and express their opinions about the news of the day. And specialists will also continue to be needed, to explain complex issues in easy-to-understand language. What will change is the way that we’ll be delivering that information.

  “The practice of journalism is increasingly becoming a highly collaborative art,” Wilson told me, “because technology is changing, because the tools we have at our disposal are changing, because the ways in which people consume information are changing. It will require both an extraordinary level of curiosity and [much] versatility on the part of journalists. It’s no longer the kind of solo act that it used to be. It requires a kind of flexibility and an understanding of how to respond to new storytelling techniques and tools, and to immerse yourself in that. It will require constant learning over the course of your career.” Increasingly, print, radio, and television journalists will be working together in order to see what’s the most efficient way to present each individual story. Some stories will require more written content, others will need more audio, and others more visual effects. But most, if not all, will be the result of teamwork.

  When I asked Gilbert for his advice for young journalists who are starting their careers, he told me that—in addition to being curious, persistent, and flexible, and learning how to tell a story using different media—reporters will require a basic understanding of data analysis, statistics, and math.

  “A lot of the skills are still the same: I think you need to be a dogged reporter. Our best journalists
are those who can get to someone and sort of read the situation and ask the follow-up question that’s both critical and unexpected. Those kinds of skills are absolutely essential,” Gilbert told me. “But on the other hand, data analysis is something that absolutely needs to be taught. I don’t think it should be taught instead of writing, but I think it’s pretty foolish to train someone as a reporter who doesn’t have any aspect of data analysis to their job. Virtually every beat I can think of, whether you’re talking about covering fashion or architecture or investigative journalism, politics, business, financial, or technology—all of those things should probably have some element of data analysis, and certainly the ability to understand and work with numbers. You can’t say, ‘I’m a reporter because I don’t like math,’ or ‘I went to journalism school because I didn’t want to study math.’ We all need to do math, whether we’re journalists or just citizens. It’s critical.”

  Data-driven journalism is already a reality in every corner of the profession, and it’s changing the face of U.S. newsrooms. At the Miami Herald, there is a giant screen in the middle of the newsroom showing real-time results of Chartbeat, the program that shows a ranking of the newspaper’s most visited stories on the web that day. In addition, all the paper’s reporters get a weekly chart with their respective stories’ click numbers, and are expected to increase their figures by about 10 percent a year. We get regular coaching sessions on headline writing and search engine optimization. We are expected to pay attention to our audience. “Listening to your readers doesn’t mean that you lose your journalism values,” says the Herald’s executive editor, Mindy Marques.

  AFTER THE PANAMA PAPERS: A.I.-DRIVEN JOURNALISM

  The Panama Papers investigation may go down in history as the first example of journalism assisted by artificial intelligence and directed by journalists who specialized in data analysis. The investigation, which earned a Pulitzer Prize for the Miami Herald, began in late 2014 when the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung obtained from an anonymous source nearly 13 million files from the database of the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, Panama’s Mossack Fonseca. The German paper contacted the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) for help in determining whether the leaked documents included instances of massive money laundering. The ICIJ then assembled a team of nearly six hundred journalists from roughly a hundred media outlets around the world to review the documents.

  Matthew Caruana Galizia, a software engineer and data journalist from Malta who set up the database for the Panama Papers investigation, told me that his team created a database with a search engine that allowed journalists to search for the names they were interested in among the nearly 13 million files. Without having that search system in its closed platform, he explained, it would have been impossible for reporters around the world to do the research because there was no human way to peruse and cross-check 13 million documents.

  Now that ICIJ has created this platform, the next time there’s a massive data leak, reporters will be able to use artificial intelligence not only to search for people but also to make connections between those people and other personalities or organizations, he told me. The ICIJ is expecting to have its new platform up and running by 2019, he said.

  “This is going to revolutionize the industry,” said Caruana Galizia, who studied journalism at City University of London. “Those applications are going to free up journalists from the boring and expensive task of research, which means spending entire days in the archives, searching manually and aimlessly for patterns. It won’t replace a journalist’s job, but it will make it more efficient.”

  THE COMPUTER WILL INCREASE JOURNALISTS’ CAPACITY, BUT IT WON’T REPLACE THEM

  A comprehensive report issued by the Associated Press, titled “The Future of Augmented Journalism: A Guide for Newsrooms in the Age of Smart Machines,” concluded that while artificial intelligence will have a tremendous impact on the media industry, “technology changes, journalism doesn’t.” According to the study, “AI is not a silver bullet. Artificial intelligence can’t solve every problem. As the technology evolves, it will certainly allow for more precise analysis, but there will always be challenges the technology can’t overcome.”

  For example, “AI is susceptible to the same biases and errors as humans. Artificial intelligence is designed by humans, and humans make mistakes. Therefore, AI can make mistakes. Furthermore, an AI system is only as good as the data that goes into it.” The study offers a hypothetical example in which journalists could create an algorithm to find out in what parts of the world oil drilling has caused deforestation. But if because of an oversight the journalists feed the algorithm only with images of deforestation in mountain ranges caused by oil drilling, the intelligent machine would mistakenly conclude that oil companies cause deforestation only in mountainous regions. According to the study, artificial intelligence will be crucial when it comes to processing data and analyzing millions of documents in a matter of seconds, but there will always be a need for human journalists to check the conclusions of the intelligent machines. The study concludes that “artificial intelligence can help augment journalism, but it will never replace journalism. AI might aid in the reporting process, but journalists will always need to put the pieces together and construct a digestible, creative narrative.”

  I agree, though artificial intelligence is likely to cause many journalists to lose their jobs along the way. The next time there is a Panama Papers–type investigation, it may no longer require nearly 600 reporters across the world. The industry will no longer hire mostly liberal arts graduates, but will increasingly recruit data analysts and engineers. And reporters will have to be versed in print, audio, and visual media in order to tell their stories. The way the news is presented and analyzed will be very different, though the essence of journalism won’t change. For many of us, hopefully, it will continue to be the most wonderful job on earth.

  3

  THEY’RE COMING FOR SERVICE WORKERS!

  THE FUTURE OF RESTAURANTS, SUPERMARKETS, AND RETAIL STORES

  TOKYO, JAPAN

  While in Japan, I saw the future of restaurants with my own eyes. Besides staying in a hotel run by robots, I ate at sushi restaurants where the hostesses, servers, and even the chefs were robots. In one of them, Hamazushi, in the Shinagawa shopping center in southern Tokyo, I was welcomed by a humanoid robot named Pepper, who spread his arms and bowed slightly while saying in Japanese, “Welcome, I am the host.” Then he asked us, “For how many people would you like a table?” Luckily I was there with my wife and some Japanese friends from Miami—Masami and his wife, Mihoko—who could interpret what Pepper was saying for us. The robot pointed to a screen on its chest where we could indicate, from one to ten, the number of people in our party.

  “Would you like a table or would you prefer to sit at the bar?” the robot then asked, spreading its arms and showing its palms. When we said that we’d like a table, Pepper replied, “I’ll have one for you right away.” He then issued a ticket with the number 449 printed on it, and a few minutes later, a TV screen on the wall informed us that our group, 449, could take our seats at table 24.

  It was easy enough to find it because the tables were arranged like train cars around a conveyor belt carrying the dishes, each of which carried a small sign with a number matching a corresponding table. Once we settled ourselves at the table, we began placing our orders using an electronic tablet located there. The table was already stocked with everything we would need for our meal, from chopsticks to a box of tea bags and a tap for hot water. Soon enough, our orders came rolling down the line to our table. Much to my surprise, the sushi was pretty good, or at least it seemed fresh!

  THE MYSTERY OF THE ROBOTIC SUSHI CHEF

  I was curious to find out whether the sushi itself was prepared by a chef or a robot, so I asked Masami to ask a young woman busing tables—the only flesh-and-blood work
er in sight—if we could see the kitchen. In Japanese, Masami explained to her that I was a curious tourist visiting from the United States. The young woman stared at us bewildered before stammering that she’d have to check with the manager. A few minutes later, she returned to say that because of company policy, it wouldn’t be possible for us to visit the kitchen. We asked if we could speak with the manager to see if he might reconsider, and soon enough, a man roughly forty years old wearing a light blue uniform and a chef’s hat showed up. He was wearing a name tag on his chest that read Araki. Politely yet quite firmly Araki informed us that he could not allow customers into the kitchen without authorization from corporate headquarters. But through our friend Masami, I pressed him to tell me if the sushi was prepared by a chef or a robot. The manager started off by claiming that this was a company secret, but—after much insistence and a lot of back-and-forth—he ended up admitting that the sushi “is prepared automatically.”

  I had more questions. How many people work at this particular restaurant? I asked. Again, Araki replied that this was also a company secret, but after a prolonged discussion in Japanese—of which I wasn’t able to understand a word—Masami told me what he had been able to uncover. Apparently, each restaurant in the Hamazushi chain employs about ten people, spread across several shifts, and most of them are part-timers. Once Araki had left with a polite, respectful bow, we did our math. There were sixty-six tables, each of which could seat from four to six people, meaning that the restaurant had a capacity of 250 customers. And there probably were only four human employees working per shift: one at the register, who was there just in case someone wanted to pay with cash instead of using a credit card at one of the table tablets; two whose job was to clean the tables; and one who managed the place.