Pulitzer Prizes 2020: ” I want to thank all the little people who helped….”
Poynter reported today that The Associate Press will start using robots to write business stories.
AP will announce Monday that it plans to use automation technology from a company called Automated Insights to produce stories about earnings reports. The software means that “instead of providing 300 stories manually, we can provide up to 4,400 automatically for companies throughout the United States each quarter,” AP Managing Editor Lou Ferrara writes in a Q&A.
While this AP claims that this will have no impact on current staffing, my guess is that this will not last for long.
If robots can build cars the can apparently write business stories.
And if they can write business stories, my guess is that they can also write sports stories or international affairs stories or entertainment stories.
As any writer or producer of content knows, these things tend to follow a pattern. Learn the pattern, learn the algorythm and pretty soon you can
crank out the stories with your eyes closed. Or a machine can learn to do them for you.
It’s the next logical step in industrialization.
One can only wonder how long it will take for robots to start producing the content for The Network Evening News.
No unions.
No sick days.
No complaining.
No lunch breaks.
No office politics.
No office, in fact.
No HR.
No nothing.
White collar workers can now begin to commiserate with their blue collar friends who lost their jobs one tech iteration ago.
Soup kitchens will be overflowing, but I am sure someone can design a robot to make soup and serve it.
Soon we will all have nothing to do, except perhaps read the AP business wire – about how robots have taken over pretty much everything.
I missed my window of opportunity when the digital revolution came around.
I am not going to be so dumb when it comes to the robot revolution.
So I am busy working in my garage.
I am building the next generation.
A robot that READS the AP news wire that the other robots make.
That shouldl close the circle completely.
Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2014
