Sorry, I don't welcome our new robot overlords of journalism. No matter how advanced "narrative science" becomes.
Sometimes I wonder just what the fuck will be left for humans to actually be doing in the year 2060. Y ou think we'll be Living the good life in a robot-created hedonistic utopia, sitting around sipping perfectly mixed drinks and listening to robots read robot-written novels?
No, we still live under the long shadows of capitalism, and considering how the average American seems to less and less intelligent over time, and the increasingly omnipresence of entertainment, it's likely we will always choose to remain enslaved. This means more so called "white collar" work will become "unnecessary" and the former practitioners can join the rest of the unemployed underclass until we're all down there in the dogpile. Maybe I'm being a bit luddite and reactionary, but, really, where does all of this end? Will any work by real humans be of any value two or three generations from now, once the work of robots is indistinguishable from the work of humans? This is the sort of doomsday scenario that keeps me awake at night.
Naw. I think the future of jounalism will look more like the depiction in Sleep Dealer. Video-based stories sold P2P, as a form of intimate story telling. I don't think Skynet could pull that off.
In all seriousness (from having written a number of narrative engines), Will is right on here.
Editing is the trick.
However, I believe that editing will be crowd-sourced or piece-worked. Or, perhaps just another algo for 'preference-based' or 'profile-based' aggregation against a generated narrative.
e.g. A Millon Monkeys at typewriters, check.
Ten million iphone users getting paid 0.09 per day to 'like' or 'not like' or 'edit' some crap that a database spit out of our linguistic ancestry; that's coming tomorrow.
I can't articulate my thoughts on this, but I feel so sad now.
Thanks, Cienna. It had been such a beautiful morning.
Sometimes I wonder just what the fuck will be left for humans to actually be doing in the year 2060. Y ou think we'll be Living the good life in a robot-created hedonistic utopia, sitting around sipping perfectly mixed drinks and listening to robots read robot-written novels?
No, we still live under the long shadows of capitalism, and considering how the average American seems to less and less intelligent over time, and the increasingly omnipresence of entertainment, it's likely we will always choose to remain enslaved. This means more so called "white collar" work will become "unnecessary" and the former practitioners can join the rest of the unemployed underclass until we're all down there in the dogpile. Maybe I'm being a bit luddite and reactionary, but, really, where does all of this end? Will any work by real humans be of any value two or three generations from now, once the work of robots is indistinguishable from the work of humans? This is the sort of doomsday scenario that keeps me awake at night.
Since this memory is a few decades old, I'm sure it's a misquote, something a computer would never do.
Or editing?
Writing I could believe. News aggregators basically just do zero work and repackage press releases.
But editing?
That's a skill.
It needs a name. Strange-u-tron 5000?
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Imagine the gems of wisdom that might be produced by such an algorithm.
In all seriousness (from having written a number of narrative engines), Will is right on here.
Editing is the trick.
However, I believe that editing will be crowd-sourced or piece-worked. Or, perhaps just another algo for 'preference-based' or 'profile-based' aggregation against a generated narrative.
e.g. A Millon Monkeys at typewriters, check.
Ten million iphone users getting paid 0.09 per day to 'like' or 'not like' or 'edit' some crap that a database spit out of our linguistic ancestry; that's coming tomorrow.