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Opinion: Automatic news for the people

Last week I wrote about the futuristic fear that our inventions will overtake us one day.

Last week I wrote about the futuristic fear that our inventions will overtake us one day. But forget sci-fi scenarios of Terminators tumbling out of time portals; 30 years after James Cameron’s fictional cyborg went staggering after young John Connor, the merger of people and machines is well underway — albeit in a coffee-shop hotspot kinda way.

Most of us spend a significant part of our waking lives in silent communion with smart phones, tablets and laptops — me included. This cross-generational transformation has occurred incredibly quickly, with both the young and not-so young falling under the spell of what documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis calls “our machines of loving grace.”

And who’s going to deny there are great things about the immediate access to the global information network? For sheer entertainment value, the stranger next to you in Starbucks can hardly compete with Facebook, Twitter and other clock-suckers. Bearing this in mind, the new Apple Watch might seem faintly ridiculous now, but that won’t stop wristband computing from catching on with the early adopters. Even if the watch and its competitors fizzles out after that, the association between microchips and flesh is bound to become more intimate and complex. (A cyborg is “a fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body,” according to my — ahem — Apple dictionary.)

But who needs cyborgs when you can eliminate human workers entirely? The other day I stood at the entrance of a Vancouver megastore, surprised by the empty space. The store had replaced a line of cash registers with a couple of digital checkout stations.

At least half a dozen shifts were no more, with some unquantified spill-off effect on local retail activity. (And if you believe that lost service industry jobs will soon be offset by an equal number of better-paying information economy jobs, I have a starship warp core to sell you.)

Not that any of this is new. For decades, North American blue collar workers have been losing ground through automation and work outsourced to free trade zones in the Third World. Even back in 19th century, economic historian Karl Marx could see how factory owners of the industrial revolution were using new technology to leverage capital against labour.

What’s new is that we’re starting to hear alarm bells from the managerial class now that digital technology is threatening their jobs, too. A whole range of services once thought impervious to outsourcing (including the “discovery” process in the legal field, and medical diagnosis), can be performed by computers that scan and identify information networks in microseconds.

Last March, a Los Angeles Times story on a shallow earthquake in Westwood, California, appeared online only three minutes after the quake. L.A. Times staffer and computer programmer Ken Schwencke invented a script that combed data from U.S. Geological Survey servers, and automatically funnelled it through a program that churned out a grammatically correct, standard AP-style report.

One automated writing program, Quill, can hunt through immense volumes of data and correctly organize the relevant information in a readable form. Bear in mind this is what brain-dead algorithms can do right now, without a whiff of “machine consciousness.”

Computer scientist Kris Hammond, who runs a Chicago firm called Narrative Science, projects that by 2025, 90 per cent of the news consumed by readers will be generated by computers. The remaining 10 per cent will constitute boutique journalism, in the form of opinion pieces and long-form essays.

Imagine a future when natural language programs access marketing databases that contain more information about you than even you know: your every search term, text message, and quantifiable quirk — right down to your smart home-monitored eating and sleeping patterns.

“One day, there will only be a single reader for each article,” Hammond told Le Monde reporter Yves Eudes. Micro-customized service excellence or networked narcissism?

Either way, Hammond doesn’t believe robots will finish off flesh-based journalists, just that the volume of published material will “massively increase.”

“Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts,” observed William Burroughs, who died in 1997. By the end of his life, the cranky Kansas author could see the 20th century receding quickly in the rear-view mirror. For those of us on the other side of the millennium, it’s going to be a weird ride.

geoffolson.com
 

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