BEIJING, Sept. 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — This is an op-ed from China Daily.
Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel Ubik imagined a door that demands payment before opening — a fantasy then, but eerily prescient in today’s AI-driven world. While Elon Musk predicts AI will bring global abundance, for traditional media that abundance has already arrived — with devastating consequences.
The question is no longer whether AI changes media, but what role professional journalism can play when information is plentiful, yet truth, context and reality grow scarce.
Dick’s own life — overlooked, depressed and penniless — belied his extraordinary foresight. In The Man in the High Castle, he imagined alternate realities. Today, personalized algorithms, misinformation and AI-generated content make such alternate realities all too real.
Yet Dick’s vision also offers hope through an unexpected link with the ancient Chinese I Ching (Book of Changes). Both suggest reality is not fixed, but a pattern of ever-shifting possibilities. The I Ching asks not “What will happen?” but “What situation am I in, and how should I respond to its changing pattern?” That, arguably, is precisely the role media must adopt in the AI age: providing orientation, credibility and meaning when information itself has lost its scarcity and economic value.
Not all sci-fi is dystopian. Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics embodied faith that humans could impose rules on technology — yet today’s AI race is far more complex. Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek imagined a moneyless, post-scarcity civilization; AI may be bringing that closer, just as Google’s free search and maps once upended the world.
So where does this leave traditional media? In a Dickian dystopia, media could become a modern-day I Ching — helping people navigate uncertainty, distinguish illusion from reality, and make informed choices when no single truth prevails. In a Roddenberry-esque future, media could guide humanity on how to live wisely with AI-driven abundance.
The practical challenge remains: financing itself in the first scenario and inspiring itself in the second. As Dick warned in The Man in the High Castle, humanity’s “destiny lies in the hands of a few men.” We can only hope some of them are traditional media editors.
