I think it’s time we talked about the elephant in the room.
And by elephant in the room, I mean the robot sitting at my desk.
The other day I received an email from a random stranger. In the subject line he wrote simply “FYI.” In the main body was posted a link to a story with the headline “Google Funding Software that Writes Local News.”
Robot news reporters, in other words. They’re coming faster than you can place an order at an unmanned McDonald’s kiosk.
The article describes how the news bots will pull information from a variety of online sources to create stories that address the who, what, when, why and where details that we human reporters love so much.
Five years ago, I would have snorted derisively (I’ve been working on my derisive snort) at this concept. Computer software gathering and sorting the complex details of a downtown house fire? Artificial intelligence trying to make sense of one of those messy brouhahas in Kennedy Park?
It is to laugh. I’ll bet Google’s robot reporters don’t even know what a brouhaha is. Heck, a donnybrook might crash the system entirely.
I’m no longer snorting, derisively or otherwise. We’ve all seen with our own human eyes how news works these days. When shots are fired, fists are thrown or things go up in flames, there are generally five people with cellphone cameras right there to document the action. They post their updates, send out their tweets and post their thrill-packed videos live for all to see in real time.
Police respond by sending out press releases and posting updates on their own Facebook pages. TV news reporters dash off tweets. Newspapers post briefs on the web. News spreads at the speed of the internet and out there in the ether, your faceless reporter robot is scooping it all in with more digital fingers than you can count. Even a robot with Pong intelligence would be able to manage this assortment of facts and attribute accordingly.
“One puny human was shot and another puny human was arrested Friday in Lewiston’s Kennedy Park, according to a police release. According to video capture by puny human subjects at the scene, both men were wearing Crocs and nothing more when six shots were fired from a Glock 19 at 7:07:07 post meridiem.”
It ain’t pretty, but all the details are there. And while the puny human reporter at the scene is limited to the information that’s in his direct vicinity, Robot R. Murrow has all of cyberspace from which to gather bits and pieces of what will become the bigger story.
Those closed-circuit cameras set up on practically every municipal street corner? Robot reporter can tap into those.
Court records? Robot Cronkite can blast through reams in nano seconds while your poor slob of a human reporter has to hump his butt down to district court and read line by line. If the courthouse is open, that is.
Robot reporter doesn’t need sleep. Or coffee. Or cigarettes with which to bribe potential sources. Robot reporter has no other purpose than to gather the news bit by byte all day, every day.
And that’s with the technology that we know about. I don’t know how ethical Droid Woodward plans to be, but if he doesn’t mind bending the rules a bit, well then, sir. This artificially intelligent stud is going to rock the world of news.
Robot reporter knows who goes where and when by tapping into the E-ZPass system. Robot reporter owns Google Earth and so can peer into your backyard anytime to see how your garden is growing. Robot reporter can read your email, listen to your calls and analyze all of your social media interactions dating back to MySpace.
Robot reporter is just getting started.
We journalists made of flesh and bone tend to defend ourselves from this rise of the machines by pointing out that robots can’t handle the kind of nuance that makes for a gripping story.
Can artificial intelligence read the raw anguish in a grieving mother’s face? Can it accurately describe the violent sobbing of the city leader brought down for corruption?
Silly human. Of course it can. There’s nothing new about technology designed to analyze the human face in order to interpret stress levels and individual emotions. There’s nothing novel about the polygraph. Quark Kent will be capable of assessing human emotion, right down to the sodium content of tears, far better than his fleshy counterparts on the street.
“At a press conference, the former mayor expressed 62 percent fear, 7 percent shame and 28 percent wondering if the Bears would cover the spread as he wept for four minutes, eight seconds and admitted to spending $86,753.09 of taxpayer dollars attending My Little Pony conferences around the world.”
Not pretty, but it beats the hell out of “the mayor looked pretty darned upset as he confessed to stealing a bunch of dough.”
Robot reporters, bub. While I tend to picture one of those clumsy, stumbling hunks of metal like the one that showed up on Gilligan’s Island that one time, the scary fact is that you’ll never really know for sure when one is at work. Robot reporters reside behind the black eyes of the drone floating overhead. They exist in the invisible packets of information beaming between satellites too high to see. Robot reporters are everywhere and nowhere at all.
In fact, can you be so sure that a robot didn’t write this very column? Nossir, you cannot, although I’ll do my best to convince you otherwise.
I ask you: could a robot do THIS?
*snorts derisively*
Robot Bly, um, Mark AI LaFlamme, is a Sun Journal staff writer. Email (or mind-meld) him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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