May 22, 2016

The Day a Computer Blogs

The prospect of a novel written by a robot winning a literary prize (as it happened in Japan late March this year) should be worrying us. This can mean potential ability to write & publish hundreds of books in a single minute while being consistent in narrative, themes, and plots. Imagine what this would do to the human attention - which is faced with the prospect of filtering out thousands of books to select a particular book. Apart from the effects on the attention, this will put human authors (never could imagine using this phrase) in direct competition with a robot.

If the sources for content for a human to write a book include experience, imagination, observation or some level of constructs in the mind, what would be the sources of content for a book written by a robot? As the current case is, it is from some inputs from humans on key words and phrases or storylines (perhaps).

Keeping the potential problems aside, this is a big step for human race and there are many similar developments that aims to make life easier. Take Gmail's smart reply feature for instance. The intention is to save time and that life will become simpler if you don't have to type out replies to every email you receive.

Then, there are solutions such as wordsmith that will create - not just articles - but personalized articles given a data set. When the intention becomes 'to make what is possible', then objectives like 'making life simpler becomes miniscule'. 

With these, imagine the news industry - all they would need is the editor. Then, just like that, that's all we would need - an editor who would screen, filter and separate - not what is good from what is bad - but, what suits the taste to an individual creating personalized books, newspapers, magazines etc., 

With services like Flipboard and even Facebook delivering the same, you just have to see your phone for the personalized news & magazine that is waiting for you. The day will not be far when you have to fire up your device (whichever that is) to find the new book written exclusively for you. That day, it will not matter who writes the blogpost. The day the computer writes a blogpost will not be noticed by humans and may become a data point.

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