THE NAKED CITY – ROGET THE ROBOT

Nothing really surprises us these days when it comes to the rampaging onslaught of technology, supposedly enhancing our lives and stimulating our creative juices. With a cheap HD camera anybody can become a film director or a YouTube phenomenon. Likewise, with enough original content, you can blog your way to an audience of millions.

But what about when all that wonderful high tech wizardry is deployed in a different direction and the creative process becomes the domain of seemingly autonomous machines? Yes baby, if you haven’t heard already, robots are starting to write our daily news. Journalists are being replaced by super sophisticated software, that sucks up the raw facts and spews out a story in a matter of minutes. Already Associated Press, one of the world’s biggest news gathering companies, is pumping out over 5,000 stories a month, using algorithms to create content.

Admittedly, this automated content is confined at the moment to fairly basic reporting like sport and finance, but even now it can be nuanced to inject comment and ‘bite’ into the copy. Don’t ask us mere ‘technophobes’ how all this is achieved, but we assume the software comes with both negative and positive options. Like when the robots are reporting on Australia all out for 60 in the first innings of the recent Ashes test, they automatically search for words like “humiliating”, “shameful” and “pitiful”.

Whilst the ‘wordsmith’ robots are little more than first year interns in the world of journalism, it’s only a matter of time before technology equips them with the computer power to write more complex news items, from in-depth political analysis to editorials and opinions pieces. Look out Piers and Miranda, the robots are coming to get you – ready to appropriate your diatribes and reap your rich legacy of clichés, like the “chattering classes”, “the nanny state”, “pro-choice feminists”, “the politically correct left” and all that is evil about the ABC.

Journalism is of course only the initial frontier, and in the brave new world the robotic scribes will be churning out everything from Mills & Boon romance pulp to screenplays for the latest Hollywood blockbuster. The art of writing could be lost forever as children are given their own personal robot from a very early age, whipping up homework and other school assignments with the click of a mouse.

If you thought ‘spell check’ was lazy and contributed to illiteracy – wait until a PhD is churned out literally overnight, and university degrees become a dime a dozen. Newspapers, as we know them today, will actually survive but they will be written entirely by robots, programmed with either left, right or middle of the road biases. Eventually the machines will totally divorce themselves entirely from any human pre-programming and develop their own autonomous ideology – think Rupert Murdoch meets Hal from 2001 A Space Odyssey…