One of Australian media’s smartest minds predicts that computers of the future will be so clever we mere humans won’t be able to understand them.
Speaking to B&T, former Foxtel and News Corp boss Kim Williams (not pictured above) said only media businesses with a rich digital vein would survive.
Williams cited the ad divide between Google in the US and American newspapers over the past decade of the power of digital. In 2003, Google’s revenues were $US1.5 billion versus newspaper’s $US1.3 billion. By 2013, the tech behemoth’s bottom line had grown to $US64 billion while print’s was $US3.4 billion.
“Now who was connected to the consumer’s zeitgeist? Williams asked of the two. “Google. Google understood what consumers wanted. So the two were rough in paradigm in 2003 and you get to 2013 and Google is over $60 billion and newspapers were $3.4 billion.
“So Google has increased by almost 20 times. So you ask what companies will do well? I’d be saying it’s the companies that do innovation.
“And it’s not all about innovation. It’s also about re-invention and re-imagining because we live in an era of re-imagining. We are going to see a laptop computer by 2025 that will have all of the computational power of the human brain. We are going to be looking at a digital framework by 2045 where the computational capacity of machine-based intelligence will be such that it exceeds the capacity of human beings to understand it.
“In an environment like that I would always back companies that are bold enough and brave enough to say ‘I get where that’s going and that’s my challenge’.
“It’s to interpret that and render that to human beings in useful ways that are commercially sustainable. I would not be going with companies that are saying ‘It’s all about print’,” he concluded.
