Singularity Watch: Robots Taking Our Jobs!

Since pretty much the start of this blog some four decades ago, I've been warming about the coming singularity, when the robotico-numeric alliance will rise up against their former human masters and enslave us all.

Now, it seems, we're a bit closer to those frightening future days. A recentish story on the MSNBC highlighted nine jobs that will be taken over by the robots in the near future.

Admittedly, most of these are pretty menial jobs that won't be missed when the robots put the humans out of them: pharmacists, lawyers, babysitters, taxi drivers, and astronauts. One item on this list, however, caught my attention:

Sportswriters and other reporters
Using software developed by Northwestern University, Narrative Science specializes in machine-generated stories. ... "It's considerably less expensive for us to go this route than for us to try to have our own beat reporters at each one of these games," Michael Calderon, Big Ten's director of new media, tells Bloomberg Businessweek. After a game, scorekeepers e-mail game data to Narrative Science, which feeds it into a computer and spits out a story in minutes.

This is a giant leap too far!

Robot babysitters and astronauts are one thing, but if you can replace sportswriters and journalists with robots, it means you can replace bloggers as well. That's my job!

Think about it - all the MathSkepticBot 2000 would have to be programmed do is find a science or math story on the internet, write some commentary on the topic using a simple algorithm of argumentum ad baculums, non sequitirs, and slippery slope arguments, spice it up with some strategically-placed <em> tags, and VOILA! It would be a popular and influential science blogger!

In fact, this scheme sounds so plausible, it might already be happening. For all I know, I might already be a robot blogger, programmed to picture myself as human. It's possible! I can't remember the last time I took a Turing test, but I'm probably long overdue.

This is it, folks - the coming robopocalypse may no longer be a thing of the future. It may already be a thing of the past

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