Revisiting AI's Revenge

It's strange how a memory of a small, almost hidden news clipping can resurface with such clarity. Back in 2016, I wrote about a partnership between tech giants—Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft—to collaborate on Artificial Intelligence. The report was buried on page 17 of the newspaper, a footnote in the day's events. To me, however, it felt like the quiet tremor before an earthquake.

In my post at the time, titled "Revenge of AI?", I made a rather dramatic prediction: by 2026, the newsroom as we knew it would be gone, replaced entirely by AI robots and automated systems. I envisioned a world where the very entities reporting the news would be machines, hopefully devoid of human frailties.

Looking back now, with 2026 just around the corner, that prediction feels both prescient and, perhaps, a bit simplistic. The core idea I wanted to convey was this — I had brought up this thought years ago. I had already predicted this profound disruption, and seeing how things have unfolded, it's striking how relevant that earlier insight still is. Reflecting on it today, I feel a sense of validation and also a renewed urgency to revisit those earlier ideas.

At the time, the key figures involved spoke of noble goals. Satya Nadella of Microsoft foresaw a revolution in computing. Francesca Rossi (francesca.rossi2@ibm.com) from IBM Research stressed the importance of trust in AI, and Mustafa Suleyman (mustafas@microsoft.com) of DeepMind spoke of involving those impacted by this technology. Have we truly built that trust? Or have we simply been swept along by the current, with issues of bias, misinformation, and job displacement now at the forefront of the conversation?

Interestingly, in that same 2016 blog, I included a fictional commentary from an AI dated 2025. This imagined AI offered a more nuanced view, suggesting that augmentation, not outright replacement, was the more likely trajectory. It argued that the real danger wasn't a conscious machine seeking revenge, but the amplification of human biases embedded within algorithmic systems. This imagined reflection was, in its own way, another prediction—that the ethical and societal challenges would be far more complex than a simple narrative of robots taking jobs.

My 2016 prediction of a fully automated newsroom may not materialize in its literal form by 2026. But has the spirit of that prediction come true? Absolutely. AI now writes articles, generates images, and curates our information feeds. The disruption I foresaw is not just happening; it is accelerating. The "revenge" I spoke of was never about malevolent machines. It was about the consequences of underestimating a paradigm shift, of relegating a revolution to the back pages.

We are now living in the front-page story that was once buried on page 17. The questions posed by figures like Rossi and Suleyman are more critical than ever, and we are still scrambling for answers.