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It's much more fun to code a robot than to hire a journalist :-) But also, once you get to massive robot production, then the amount of journalists will seem s

It's much more fun to code a robot than to hire a journalist :-) But also, once you get to massive robot production, then the amount of journalists will seem small. Think of content personalized to each user. Real time description of things around you in your software. In our startup we plan to have a robot write the plot for user generated games based on their custom settings. Hiring a writer for each use would certainly increase our costs.

knowtheory 14y ago
Explain to me why this isn't techno-utopian claptrap? The thing that frustrates me about the way that Narrative Science is discussed and some of the unhinged techno-futurism stuff that people write, is that it's never about making people or individuals more effective. Automated processes and people have different strengths. Computers really aren't that great at pretending that they're people, and people are bad at accuracy on repetitive tasks. That people keep on talking about "replacing" so-and-so misses the point. Change their market, change their workflows, make them better at accomplishing the function journalists or whomever play in society. Endeavoring to make them obsolete is both unnecessarily inflammatory and also not terribly sensible.
- vibrunazo 14y ago
  We don't wanna replace them as the end goal. We simply have repetitive tasks that could be automated. Whether that automation will, in fact, replace journalists or assist them. Is another problem that depends on your specific implementation details and economics. For our company specific use. Hiring a writer to be assisted by our robots would just add unnecessary cost to the process and delay to the end user experience. Versus pretty much little to no gain in quality. We only need a simple transformation from structured data to narrated english, and we want lots of it to be delivered instantly to our users. It just makes more sense for applications like ours to have robots replace humans.
- Retric 14y ago
  Individuals may be more flexible than computers, but large groups of people tend to be less so. Compare the effort MacDonald's needs to deploy a new recipe with the effort it takes Google to change pagerank and I don't think people come out ahead.
aqme28 14y ago
Pretty sure you could hire an unpaid intern who would do that happily, which would hardly cost you anything.

knowtheory 14y ago

Explain to me why this isn't techno-utopian claptrap? The thing that frustrates me about the way that Narrative Science is discussed and some of the unhinged techno-futurism stuff that people write, is that it's never about making people or individuals more effective. Automated processes and people have different strengths. Computers really aren't that great at pretending that they're people, and people are bad at accuracy on repetitive tasks. That people keep on talking about "replacing" so-and-so misses the point. Change their market, change their workflows, make them better at accomplishing the function journalists or whomever play in society. Endeavoring to make them obsolete is both unnecessarily inflammatory and also not terribly sensible.

vibrunazo 14y ago
We don't wanna replace them as the end goal. We simply have repetitive tasks that could be automated. Whether that automation will, in fact, replace journalists or assist them. Is another problem that depends on your specific implementation details and economics. For our company specific use. Hiring a writer to be assisted by our robots would just add unnecessary cost to the process and delay to the end user experience. Versus pretty much little to no gain in quality. We only need a simple transformation from structured data to narrated english, and we want lots of it to be delivered instantly to our users. It just makes more sense for applications like ours to have robots replace humans.
Retric 14y ago
Individuals may be more flexible than computers, but large groups of people tend to be less so. Compare the effort MacDonald's needs to deploy a new recipe with the effort it takes Google to change pagerank and I don't think people come out ahead.

aqme28 14y ago

Pretty sure you could hire an unpaid intern who would do that happily, which would hardly cost you anything.