168 Conclusion
fail and its economic position was under increasing threat from China
which was transforming itself into a “world island” reaching from Beijing to western Europe and South America.
13
The end of the “American century” is by no means certain, with some observers noting that it
is China that seems increasingly vulnerable in the trade wars initiated
by Trump.
14
Yet it also remains the case that engagement with China
remains key to successful growth for the Big Five. China became the
world’s second largest economy in 2010 and, by 2015, was already
three times the size of the third largest, Japan. Such a shift (with other
countries, most notably India, emerging from their status as developing
nations) will also inevitably transform the world’s media from a focus
on the USA and, to a lesser extent, Europe towards Asia in particular.
Already companies such as CCTV (China Central Television) and the
search engine Baidu rank among the largest media conglomerations in
the world, rising through the ranks with each year as their audiences
grow by the millions. A resurgent Google, willing to compromise the
supposedly sacred objectives of western liberalism in pursuit of profit in
such markets, seems likely to provide a censored search engine to gain
access to China once more, and in such circumstances, the model for
a public sphere may be closer to that described by Lei which presents
the media as controlled by authoritarian prescriptions regarding what
can or cannot be said. That process is by no means complete, and the
proliferation of digital technologies provides opportunities for the exercise of civil power as well as control.
15
More and more governments,
however, seem willing to engage with Chinese models of media regulation than the previous standards espoused by the West – a process made
easier as the supposed liberal European and American public spheres
have demonstrated themselves fragmented and easily infiltrated by fake
news. What is almost certain is that automation will increasingly provide much of the common information that we produce, and that many
organisations – at least in the West – will also seek to control some of
the excesses of disinformation that have come to light in recent years due
to the relentless pursuit of profit by the largest technology companies.
Nonetheless, the longer-term future of the media will certainly look
upon American hegemony of world flows of news as quaint as executives
of Time Warner at the turn of the millennium must have considered the
fifteenth-century press devised by Johannes Gutenberg.
Part of that transformation of our understanding of the media will
be the role that automation has to play. In a round table for the scientific publisher, Elsevier, five experts discussed the limitations of popular
conceptions of artificial intelligence, in particular the idea of some kind
of singularity whereby AI would achieve – and then exceed – human
capabilities. According to Gary Marcus, Professor of Psychology and
Neural Science at NYU and the former CEO of Geometric Intelligence,
a machine learning start-up that was later acquired by Uber, the “biggest
fail and its economic position was under increasing threat from China
which was transforming itself into a “world island” reaching from Beijing to western Europe and South America.
13
The end of the “American century” is by no means certain, with some observers noting that it
is China that seems increasingly vulnerable in the trade wars initiated
by Trump.
14
Yet it also remains the case that engagement with China
remains key to successful growth for the Big Five. China became the
world’s second largest economy in 2010 and, by 2015, was already
three times the size of the third largest, Japan. Such a shift (with other
countries, most notably India, emerging from their status as developing
nations) will also inevitably transform the world’s media from a focus
on the USA and, to a lesser extent, Europe towards Asia in particular.
Already companies such as CCTV (China Central Television) and the
search engine Baidu rank among the largest media conglomerations in
the world, rising through the ranks with each year as their audiences
grow by the millions. A resurgent Google, willing to compromise the
supposedly sacred objectives of western liberalism in pursuit of profit in
such markets, seems likely to provide a censored search engine to gain
access to China once more, and in such circumstances, the model for
a public sphere may be closer to that described by Lei which presents
the media as controlled by authoritarian prescriptions regarding what
can or cannot be said. That process is by no means complete, and the
proliferation of digital technologies provides opportunities for the exercise of civil power as well as control.
15
More and more governments,
however, seem willing to engage with Chinese models of media regulation than the previous standards espoused by the West – a process made
easier as the supposed liberal European and American public spheres
have demonstrated themselves fragmented and easily infiltrated by fake
news. What is almost certain is that automation will increasingly provide much of the common information that we produce, and that many
organisations – at least in the West – will also seek to control some of
the excesses of disinformation that have come to light in recent years due
to the relentless pursuit of profit by the largest technology companies.
Nonetheless, the longer-term future of the media will certainly look
upon American hegemony of world flows of news as quaint as executives
of Time Warner at the turn of the millennium must have considered the
fifteenth-century press devised by Johannes Gutenberg.
Part of that transformation of our understanding of the media will
be the role that automation has to play. In a round table for the scientific publisher, Elsevier, five experts discussed the limitations of popular
conceptions of artificial intelligence, in particular the idea of some kind
of singularity whereby AI would achieve – and then exceed – human
capabilities. According to Gary Marcus, Professor of Psychology and
Neural Science at NYU and the former CEO of Geometric Intelligence,
a machine learning start-up that was later acquired by Uber, the “biggest