“Once Al Gore gets the fiber optic highways in place,” writes Crichton, “and the information capacity of the country is where it ought to be, I will be able, for example, to view any public meeting of Congress over the Net. And I will have artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page, or a nightly news show, that addresses my interests. I’ll have the twelve top stories that I want, I’ll have short summaries available, and I’ll be able to double-click for more detail. How will Peter Jennings or MacNeil-Lehrer or a newspaper compete with that? So the media institutions will have to change.”
In this piece in Wired, Michael Crichton predicts the demise of mass media. Here’s the thing: he wrote it in 1993.
