# Media's future tense in AI-driven world

- Link: https://www.thailand-business-news.com/pr-news/medias-future-tense-in-ai-driven-world
- Published: 2026-09-08T06:08:00+07:00
- Author: PR Newswire

BEIJING, Sept. 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — _This is an op-ed from China Daily._

Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel _Ubik _imagined a door that demands payment before opening—
a fantasy then, but eerily prescient in today’s AI-driven world. While Elon Musk
predicts AI will bring global abundance, for traditional media that abundance has
already arrived — with devastating consequences.

The question is no longer whether AI changes media, but what role professional journalism
can play when information is plentiful, yet truth, context and reality grow scarce.

Dick’s own life — overlooked, depressed and penniless — belied his extraordinary
foresight. In _The Man in the High Castle_, he imagined alternate realities. Today,
personalized algorithms, misinformation and AI-generated content make such alternate
realities all too real.

Yet Dick’s vision also offers hope through an unexpected link with the ancient Chinese
_I Ching_ (Book of Changes). Both suggest reality is not fixed, but a pattern of
ever-shifting possibilities. The _I Ching_ asks not "What will happen?" but "What
situation am I in, and how should I respond to its changing pattern?" That, arguably,
is precisely the role media must adopt in the AI age: providing orientation, credibility
and meaning when information itself has lost its scarcity and economic value.

Not all sci-fi is dystopian. Isaac Asimov’s _Three Laws of Robotics _embodied faith
that humans could impose rules on technology — yet today’s AI race is far more complex.
Gene Roddenberry’s _Star Trek_ imagined a moneyless, post-scarcity civilization;
AI may be bringing that closer, just as Google’s free search and maps once upended
the world.

So where does this leave traditional media? In a Dickian dystopia, media could become
a modern-day _I Ching_ — helping people navigate uncertainty, distinguish illusion
from reality, and make informed choices when no single truth prevails. In a Roddenberry-
esque future, media could guide humanity on how to live wisely with AI-driven abundance.

The practical challenge remains: financing itself in the first scenario and inspiring
itself in the second. As Dick warned in _The Man in the High Castle_, humanity’s"
destiny lies in the hands of a few men." We can only hope some of them are traditional
media editors.

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