By Tom Kirkham
According to BT 'futurologist' Ian Pearson, machine intelligence is going to make most traditionally male jobs redundant within the next twenty years. However, women - and their 'softer', emotional skills - will still be in demand apparently, and so jobs such as PR, marketing and HR are unlikely to be taken over by robots. As a male in the PR industry, this puts me in an interesting position - am I in fact a robot in disguise, desperately masking a flat Austrian accent while trying to remember what that article in Marie Claire said about emotional intelligence...? I was going to ask our own futurologist, but unfortunately Johnson King doesn't have one.
I'm not going to be lured into a debate about men versus women in PR, through fear of being poked with sticks by our predominantly female workforce. No - what interested me most about Pearson's predictions is that he assumes PR will resist the rise of the machines. But what makes him so sure? I think there's a lot of companies out there that would prefer machines as PRs...
It's common to come across senior marketing types that believe PR should be about sending out press releases indiscriminately and then calling up every journalist in the country to see if they received it. The only thing these people need is a computer with some sort of basic voice function - then it'll be goodbye emotional skills, hello ruthless automation.
Of course, this won't work with the majority of journalists today - but who knows what the future will bring? There are a growing number of news portals that simply reprint press releases verbatim, plus increased requests for 'potted comment' via email, all of which makes the job of the PR computer even easier. Our industry relies upon having an intelligent media to interact with - but if the standard of journalism falls, it becomes harder for PRs to justify their role. And while it may be flattering to see your prose used word-for-word, it does make you wonder whether journalists should be fearing the takeover of machine intelligence too.
My guess is that, for the time being, PRs are probably safe, because enough of the public still value the insight provided by good journalists over mindless regurgitation of press releases. That is of course until someone invents a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation-esque public relations robot with Genuine People Personality... hang on a sec, what was I saying about being a robot in disguise...?
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