Robots may surpass human capabilities in the newsrooms of the future, Smart Dubai Office's director general said.

Speaking to Khaleej Times, Dr Aisha bint Butti bin Bishr believes that artificial intelligence (AI) will act more time-efficiently to analyse real-time data that will flood newsrooms in the future, "surpassing human capabilities".

AI will enable newsrooms to put forward more "personalised, effective and efficient" content and ads to their audiences, she noted.

Speaking on future trends in the media industry, Dr Bishr said that digital media will continue to dominate newsrooms in the long run.

When asked if robots will replace human reporters, she said: "The answer will depend on how proactively media companies and their staff define their tasks, as that will determine their success in creating robots for those tasks.

"Such robots will need to first imitate human behaviour. But then, through sufficient training with abundant data, they can surpass human capabilities in terms of speed and accuracy. The timelines to achieve these are quite uncertain at this point; however, with strong ambition and experimentation, it is a very plausible scenario in the future. Technology is known to achieve formidable challenges in the past and, hence this prediction may be no exception."

She believes blockchain will also play a huge role in how media organisations carry out their transactions.

"Newsrooms will be flooded with real-time rich data from various sources. Media companies will have to process large amounts of data and make sense out of it in fairly short times. The sheer amount of data and the required processing capabilities of the same data may surpass human capabilities. In such instances, technology may inevitably become the only alternative," Dr Bishr said.

"Technologies, such as AI, will also allow media companies to determine the right content and the right ads for their audiences in a much more personalised, efficient and effective manner. Blockchain, as an emerging technology, may enable media sector transactions among different parties and to conduct payments with significantly reduced latency."

With digital media being dominating the newsrooms, there is a possibility that media organisations may adopt a paperless app-roach within their companies.

Smart Dubai Office's own mission is to make the emirate a paperless city. "The need for obtaining news will most likely exist in the foreseeable future. The transition that we see in most industries is a channel migration of services from traditional offline (for eg. paper based products and services) to online (digital) channels.

"Both supply and demand will play a critical role in this. The consumers of news today (newspaper and other print media readers) have already started opting for digital media due to their digital literacy, ownership of mobile phones, computers and knowledge of internet usage," she said.

"The suppliers of news today are leveraging on this trend as a business opportunity. Hence, viable and profitable business models taking into account these demand and supply trends will prevail in the future. We at Smart Dubai aim for a paperless city and have started this transition in the government sector. We believe the private sector will also embark on this trend due to its positive social, economic and environmental impacts."

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