12/19/11: Robots Finally Take Over the World

So it’s finally happened: robots are taking over the world.

Remember when there was a collective excitement that robots would start doing the boring jobs of humans? We had visions of humanoid metallic creatures like Rosie from the Jetsons cooking our dinner and cleaning our house (awesome!). The reality is much more banal – extremely un-humanlike robotic arms moving widgets on assembly lines, the proliferation of ATMs and self check-outs at the grocery store, and of course, the pathetic attempt at a cleaning robot, the Roomba. Our robots don’t really look like the robots of science fiction, which is pretty disappointing, but for most of us, these robots make life a little easier. After all, who wants to actually go in a bank and get money?

Robots are just computers, which complete robotic taks in very uninteresting shells. (Think about how much cooler it would be if an ATM looked like a humanoid robot and when you stuck your card in its torso its eyes would light up and then money would shoot out of its hand!) Anyhow, if you were in the service industry (say a checker at the grocery store, a teller at a bank, a cleaning woman – ok the Roomba did not replace any maids!), robots are a different story: they are job stealers. But for those of us in the creative field, we never feared robots. Computers just made our lives better (does anyone want to go back to paste ups? No!). We could take comfort that our artistic vision and voice would be something that could not be replicated by technology. Well recently I found out that we are not so unique and armed with just enough data, robots (ok computers) can now write “unique” stories, and in very human individualistic language.

Yikes, I’m glad I’m not a reporter! Here’s the deal: this company, Narrative Science, figured out that if given enough data in a data set, it could set up an algoritihm to write a variety of stories with the same information but from different perspectives. So, for example, let’s say you gave this robot (computer) a bunch of stats from a baseball game, runs, bats, pitches, blah blah, the computer could generate different stories about the game for different news environments, e.g., a quick blurb as if it was a wire story, or a story that focuses on the home team as if it’s in a local newspaper, or an analysis of the game play-by-play. The computer then stores the stories it writes and makes sure it never duplicates itself thereby creating a more human approach.

So as I heard this, I felt scared. How long will it be before a client can go to a website, type in “brochure,” and blam, there’s the perfect brochure? Turns out stuff like this already exists for logo designs (see logomaker.com, yuck).

To be fair, I haven’t read any of the articles from this computer-generated source, and I can only hope that they lack the depth and dimension of a real human authored piece. But for now, I remain scared: the robot revolution is finally happening, and it doesn’t look cool at all! They aren’t cooking our dinners or cleaning our houses. They’re taking over the world.

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