Posted on 07/12/2012 9:06:34 AM PDT by NOBO2012
I saw this headline on Drudge this morning: Algorithms now 'writing' articles for newspapers and websites... and I thought: “Wow - Global Warming must really be over if Al Gore is back to working as a hack.” Then I read the story and realized that algorithms involved math, which automatically eliminated Al Gore from the equation.
Al Gore dancing with his Rhythms: “Is it just me, or is it hot in here?”
The Drudge story is actually about how media companies are outsourcing their news writing to computer programs - comprised of a series of algorithms - to process masses of raw data and spit out a story:
While computers cannot parse the subtleties of each story, they can take vast amounts of raw data and turn it into what passes for news, analysts say.
"This can work for anything that is basic and formulaic,"
Wow! This is HUGE! Journalists everywhere writing what “passes for news” could be endangered. That means that all of the human reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Atlantic, Slate, The Nation, Harpers…along with every Blog in the Democratic Underground blogroll, can be replaced with an algorithm.They’re about to be “off-shored!” How can this happen on Big Guy’s watch!? How is this going to help the unemployment numbers?
Worse yet, this could hit even closer to home. What could be more “basic” than one of Lady M’s campaign speeches? Or more “formulaic” than one of Big Guy’s? Do you realize what this means!? We could soon be replacing our loyal human political cyphers…
with real ciphers...
(Excerpt) Read more at michellesmirror.com ...
George Orwell was a prophet. From 1984:
And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels -- with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.
What's really going to bake your noodle later on is when you ask yourself...
how long has this been going on without you knowing about it.
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