David Ewing Duncan:

Well, you know, maybe you are a robot, I don't know. We'll have to see this. I don't think you are, but we aren't quite there yet. But yes there is a journalism bot chapter — I couldn't help that as a journalist — and I was surprised at how far automation is already you know entered the newsroom. In 2016, actually some of the basic election coverage that year was done by A.I. programs that had certain phrases and words and data that had been programmed in. So those stories you were reading thinking a human might have written them, they were already A.I. But yeah I mean I hate to say this for you and me, much of what we do in the future might have at least some A.I. element to it. I happen to think that we will still like to have humans doing things like delivering the news on television. Right now, the economics is what's playing a huge role in all this automation and I hope we we turn a corner on that at some point and start having more of a human element, because you know the bean counters in our profession and many others, you know they're looking at the bottom line and that's what's driving a lot of this right now. So hopefully — in this book is even a bit of a plea or an effort to try to get society to start really thinking this out before we automate everything in sight.