The publisher of the second-biggest German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Frank Schirrmacher, recently published a book that was widely discussed not only in Germany, but also in the US among the likes of George Dyson, John Perry Barlow, Nick Carr and the Guardian's Annalena McCafee.

Now there may be a danger that you'll find his arguments about machines taking over a bit over the top, but don't let that put you off as there is undoubtedly a transformation going on that needs to be discussed.

Schirrmacher believes we are experiencing a profound change at the moment, an industrialisation of information – an "age of informavores" – and journalism is one of the first fields to undergo the change. Indeed, companies such as the profitable Demand Media, which recently entered Comscore's list of top 20 internet properties alongside the likes of Google, AOL, or Facebook, already let algorithms calculate what journalists should write about. In an interview with the Guardian, Schirrmacher explains what his theories are all about.

A core focus of your book is the rise of algorithms. What new role do they play in general and for journalism?

With the internet, we are experiencing the industrialisation of information and communication. Algorithms are used more and more to produce information that used to be created by journalists, or humans in general. More and more of these algorithms are being used to find out what people are thinking.

At the moment, the material foundation of journalism isn't cracking because readers are going elsewhere, but because the advertising market has shifted its interest to issues of attention. The advertising market today calculates the attention of potential clients in a new way using algorithms. This is ruining journalism.

In addition, more and more journalists are writing their headlines not for humans any more, but for Google News. Experts are telling them not only the keywords, but the structure of sentences that will be found by the algorithms of Google.

You write that journalism, among other fields, is experiencing a 'Darwinism of information'. What do you mean by that?

That refers to a book by George Dyson. Today, the factors that are important in journalism are still speed and automatisation – factors, by the way, that were responsible for starting the financial crisis. Now, it makes a big difference if you have 30 seconds to make a decision or a tenth of a second. The path we face in journalism is one in which there are fewer humans and more machines – and if you look at all the inaccurate news reports already, that is grotesque.

Humans have an intuitive awarness that has been of vital importance up till now: whoever has the information first has an advantage. But look at the financial crisis that was started by computers selling automatically. It doesn't work like this anymore.

I believe, what we will experience now will be the automation of all possible spheres, starting with journalism. Right now in terms of the constant reduction of cost we are experiencing in journalism the human component is regarded as cheap and exchangable, but in the end it will be the most expensive. I believe that in the future of journalism there will be fewer players, but the ones who invest in the human factor are going to be big ones. The well-educated, more complex human will be very expensive. But only a few of them will be needed.

Journalism is one of the first fields to experience this transformation. I believe medicine will be next. Recently I talked with the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, and he explained to me that Google is not only heading towards real-time internet, but towards predicitive search. He asked me whether I knew Apple Genius and whether I bought books at Amazon and then he said: "Now think of software that does that for your DNA – algorithms that can predict which disease patterns are likely. We will program it." I answered that I was not going to use that. He said: "You will, if it helps you."

Should journalism give in to that?

You have to understand that after Google everything was different. Google itself didn't know the technical intelligence we are starting to experience, because nobody knew that there would be so much data. In Germany you have publishers like Hubert Burda, who already knew in the 1990s all of the important media players of the future. He had all the information and knew all the founders from Google to Twitter. Now you can say that it is a problem within his enterprise, but I don't believe that. Nobody in the industry from Germany to the UK to the US knew how to react to the change. That makes me think.

What do you think of the Murdoch debate that is going on, the plan to shut out Google?

What I don't understand is something more fundamental. I can't understand why we are having a debate about the most important medium of the next few centuries with people who are enemies of technology, machine breakers so to speak, who want the paper back. This is such a fake debate and it leaves me speechless. While there might be some 80-year-old publishers who don't understand what's going on you could expect that journalists write about what is going on. Everything is changing at the moment. But instead of journalists reporting on that and leading the debate, they are engaging in a banal debate.

What do you think of Schirrmacher's thesis? Are we experiencing the industrialisation of information? Is it just a horror story to scare adults away from technology, or do any further examples come to mind?