Artificial intelligence and automation strongly hints towards a future in which
robots and software are going to reduce the need for human workforce
When Newspoll – an Australian opinion
polling brand sacked more than 100 staff
members and replaced them with robots,
it started a new transition in an era where
automation was limited to high-end engineering and
medical sector only. This telephonic polling company has
hired robopolls for automated polling and online surveys.
Surveys will be conducted by Galaxy Research under
Newspoll brand.
In 1930, during the height of the worldwide
depression, eminent British economist John Maynard
Keynes famously warned about “technological
unemployment” caused by the discovery of means of
economizing the use of labor.
Artificial intelligence and automation strongly hints
towards a future in which robots and software are going
to reduce the need for human workforce.
With advancements in cloud computing and big data
organizations are leveraging emerging technologies —
such as Artificial Intelligence and machine learning — to
classify structured and unstructured data around unique
business and processes. There is no doubt that computer
algorithms can produce authentic and factually correct
content to attract consumers
A new area for robots
Journalism is the new sector in which robots are being
used for generating quantitative content.
Robot journalism may sound very futuristic but there
is no doubt about the role it’s going to play in our lives.
The Associated Press made an announcement about
using Wordsmith software to automatically generate
news stories about college sports. This software has been
created by North Carolina-based Automated Insights.
Wordsmith works on algorithms to create content.
The AP — which is also an investor in Automated
Insights — already uses Wordsmith to generate stories
on quarterly earnings reports of various corporate
firms. The Associated Press has also announced that it
will use Wordsmith, to generate up to 4,400 corporate-
earnings report per quarter, more than ten times the
number of reports produced by human reporters. News
organizations are experimenting heavily with robot
journalism, using computer programs to transform data
into news stories or multimedia presentations
For now it is limited to company earnings reports,
stock market summaries, youth sports stories and earthquake
alerts. Wordsmith is capable of creating a million
stories which can be targeted at individual user and their
preferences. Powered by users’ data it can provide unique
stories which earlier required intensive research
stories which earlier required intensive research.
There is no reason to be worried about the rise of
robot journalism as they are purely into structured and
quantitative data analysis and not into the mainstream
journalism related to human emotion or opinion.
Think about them like an assistant reporter which
handles all the boring data figures and transforms them
into readable content, which further can be clubbed into
your original report.
How automation helps
Automation leads to job loss but this is not the case
here. On the contrary, automation is freeing up the
reporters from digging deep into hard numbers. It will
be more problematic for us when a machine with highly
developed and ever expanding AI, enters into other
fields of journalism like editorials, comparative analysis
and human interest stories. If humans, with the aid of
espionage and technology were capable of developing
the machine which destroyed the German cipher
machine Enigma, then I don’t have any doubts regarding
our future, where a sizeable amount of human workload
will be transferred to the robots.
We already have this intelligent writing software
called Quill, which has been developed by Narrative
Sciences, a Chicago based company. It turns numerical
data into story and has been used for baseball reporting
and company earning statements for Forbes. T. Rowe
Price, Credit Suisse and USAA have already subscribed
to its services to write in-depth reports on mutual fund
performance, which are meant for distribution to the
investors and regulators
Quill is programmed to write structured sentences,
paragraphs and pages.
Most of the content produced by these bots is
quantitative, thereby, making it an attractive option
for finance, health care and journalism sector, where
enormous amount of data is analyzed. These heavy-data
contents are written after crunching spreadsheets full of
sales number, sports scores or stock market figures. So
basically it’s about pure computing power skills and the
bots are surely going to beat us here
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