As farm workers found in the century before last, and factory workers in the last century — machine takeover of human work is a fact of life. And with the rise of artificial intelligence and ever cheaper, ever more powerful chips to run this AI software, not even journalists (and lowly bloggers) are immune from disruption.
Shannon Rupp writes (for now at least) in The Tyee about the state of the art in AI-journalist software. It’s amusing until it isn’t. And there’s a hint of how this AI software can function as an intelligent assistant, so maybe all is not lost.
Bots have been on the news beats since 2015, and they’re starting to get good at it. The Washington Post’s Heliograf program was a big part of its stellar election coverage, with digital-reporters writing 500 election stories, and pulling 500,000 clicks, in a fraction of the time it would take meat-reporters to churn out that copy. . . .
Heliograf also functions as a kind of journo’s assistant, alerting a human to odd voting patterns or unexpected election results. That frees up the human journalists to analyze the information, ask questions, do interviews, and write engaging prose for stories where the quality of the writing matters.
The upshot is that the Post is attracting new subscribers, partly due to the depth of its coverage. Which also means that this year it is adding about five dozen meat-journalists to the newsroom.
Afraj Gill in the Globe and Mail gives us a broader look at the AI-abundant future that is probably out there and steadily trundling our way. It’s a plea to understand the coming job and life disruption, and to plan to surf this wave, rather than getting pounded down by it.
At this point, there is little value in reiterating the litany of research on the number of jobs that will be automated in this Fourth Industrial Revolution (such as the World Economic Forum’s study stating five million jobs in 15 economies will be automated within five years – Canada is no exception, with nearly half of our jobs set to be affected by automation within a decade).
Glad to see it’s working for Wapo. Maybe they should share their strategy with slash and burn Postmedia.
This rumour of machines replacing thinking humans has been around a few decades. I can think of VERY FEW expertise areas where machines will replace humans. One is financial “advisors” i.e. stock pickers. The selling will still require humans but the investment side of it can be more automated as we see with so called robo-advisors.
Another is chess. But then, that is not a job that employs many.
What else can be automated ? Even a simple voice activated machine cannot understand even the slightest accent or nuance of humans. Like the high speed railway to Seattle, it is a pipe dream and full of wrong predictions.
Airlines or trucks could be automated with software, remote pilots and cameras, but many firms are reluctant to do it due to value of freight/cargo. We use it in drones in war zones. Where else ? Do we expect the Calgary-Vancouver airplane to go pilot-less soon ? The technology exists TODAY. Why is it not done ?
Thomas, just think how much labour and time you’d save having a bot doing all your repetitive arguments on climate change, unions, immigrants, monetization of real estate, AEVs, etc etc etc. automatically.
In fact, given their number and predictable circular logic, maybe you are a bot!
Artificial intelligence and its possible application..is causing dialogue among various knowledge based professions –lawyer-legal profession (could AI replace simple lawyer work on the front end, etc.), librarians (everyone now believes Google AI semantic intelligence, gives all the great resources in lieu of proprietary databases that Google does not extract at all…), nurses (have a robot serve your food, even listen to lonely nursing home residents).
Wonder if AI will help solve simple municipal land-use questions without going to Council debate? 🙂 Imagine cycle track planning not subject to citizen review/ public consultation.. A lot could be achieved with AI by eliminating public consultation and cities could cut out their staffing.Simple, eh? Then we could have more “perfect” cities that were liveable.
I’m being a devil’s advocate.We fall in love in technology but AI systems are created by human beings in the first place on criteria hidden in computer coding.