An apartment door arrogantly demands a payment before it opens or closes — and threatens a lawsuit when an angry visitor tries to unscrew it. The scene from Philip K. Dick's science-fiction novel Ubik may have appeared fantastical when the book was published in 1969. But nearly six decades later, artificial intelligence-powered machines have brought the idea closer to reality. And if Elon Musk is right, AI would deliver "abundance" to the world.
For the media, that period of plenty has already arrived — with devastating effects. Across the world, traditional media organizations are struggling as algorithms, platforms and AI reshape how information is produced, distributed and consumed. The paradox is striking: while the abundance of information is creating enormous wealth for big tech companies, even enabling them to challenge sovereign powers, human society is besieged by information of uncertain credibility.
The central question for traditional media is not whether AI will change the industry. It already has. The question is what role professional media can play in a world where information is abundant, but truth, context and reality are increasingly scarce.
Dick sounded a useful warning. During his lifetime, he was not recognized by the mainstream science fiction community, suffered from constant depression and died in penury. Yet, his writing anticipated a future of unstable realities and the dystopia of dehumanization with extraordinary prescience.
Another of his works, The Man in the High Castle, is particularly relevant here. It imagines an alternate world with a different version of reality. Today, the dominance of personalized algorithms, social media, misinformation, propaganda and AI-generated content shows that an alternate reality itself can be created.
Traditional media was built over centuries around institutions, professional standards and regulations designed to establish facts and uphold the truth. It has been swept aside by algorithmic personalization and AI-generated content.
Dick's novels raise the specter of a darker possibility of the AI age. His characters don't merely disagree on politics or other issues. They even disagree about what reality is. The real danger is not that machines will produce false information, but that people will become increasingly comfortable living inside alternate realities constructed for them. And they will defend this version of reality even if the truth may be quite different.
Dick's vision also has an important lesson: human beings adapt. It is here that The Man in the High Castle unexpectedly connects with the ancient Chinese I Ching, or Book of Changes. The two are separated by centuries and cultures, but both point to a profound idea: reality is not necessarily fixed; it is a pattern of constantly changing possibilities.
The I Ching, whose origins date back more than two millennia, is an ancient Chinese system of making decisions during uncertainty. The question is not, "What will happen?" Instead, it is, "What kind of situation am I in, and how should I respond to its changing pattern?"
That could be the role the media needs to play in the age of AI. If there is abundant information, it loses its scarcity and, with it, much of its economic value. What remains scarce is the ability to determine what matters, what is credible and what it means.
Not all science fiction is about dystopian futures. From Isaac Asimov to Gene Roddenberry, many writers have also imagined technology helping humanity overcome its limitations. Asimov famously proposed three laws of robotics, attempting to establish principles that would keep machines from harming humans.
The first law said a robot may not injure a human or let a human come to harm through inaction. The second law stressed that robots must obey humans, provided they don't violate the first law. The third law laid down that robots must protect themselves, unless doing so broke the first two laws.
These laws reflected the belief that human beings could impose rules on technologies. But we now know that the race for AI supremacy is far more complicated than the threats from robots Asimov imagined in 1942.
Roddenberry's Star Trek offered an even more ambitious vision: a universal civilisation that has overcome scarcity, conflict and even the pursuit of wealth. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Captain Kirk and Spock travel back in time to 20th-century San Francisco in search of a humpback whale whose survival is essential to saving Earth in the 23rd century. At one point, marine biologist Gillian Taylor asks Kirk whether people in his time still used money. "Well, we don't," replies the captain.
The world is far from being moneyless as yet. But AI-driven abundance is increasingly making it a possibility. Remember how Google turned the world upside down with the free-of-charge model for search and maps? AI's moneyless world may just be round the corner.
So, what will be the role of money in the world? It will continue to be used for natural resources, especially minerals, if the prophecies of science fiction works such as Alien, Red Mars, Avatar and Total Recall prove true.
These visions of the world offer hints for traditional media to navigate the future. In a dystopian future as described in Dick's novels, the media could become an I Ching for humanity, helping people navigate uncertainties, distinguish reality from illusion and make informed choices when there is no single agreed version of the truth. If the future is enlightened as envisioned by Roddenberry, the media could help humanity understand how to live with abundance created by AI in a universal civilisation.
The challenge for traditional media is how it can finance itself in the first scenario, and inspire itself in the second. In The Man in the High Castle, Dick warns that humanity's "destiny lies in the hands of a few men". We can only hope that some of them are traditional media editors.
Pana Janviroj
Advisor to the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council for Thailand and an editor of Asia News Network.
