Computers are better writers than a lot of people

I don't know if this is an indictment of journalism today or a small piece of support evidence for my least popular opinion ever:

Robot Sportswriter Outperforms Human (NPR)

…

The writer of that [terrible story that people assumed was written by a robot] — it turns out — was a living, breathing human being. But the creators of Narrative Science, a news-writing software program, took Deadspin's assumption as fighting words. They set out to prove that their system could produce a better story.

"We actually got hold of the information director of the school, we got the raw material, the numbers around the story," said Kris Hammond, chief technology officer of Narrative Science. "And we fed it to our system, which wrote the story, where the headline and the lead were focused on the fact that it was a no-hitter. Because how could you write a baseball story and not notice that it was a no hitter? I mean what kind of writer or machine would you be?"

I'll say it again (this is twice): Computers will be able to replicate every human creative activity within our lifetimes, and this is a good thing.

I've included the full text of the robot's article below the jump.

For our 2300th post, allow me to introduce

... the future. Holy shit!


I've got this in my pocket right now, and it works as advertised.

Also, my wife never answers her phone

Clive Thompson reports that we (we the people, not he and I) are making fewer phone calls, and the length of the calls is also going down. He explains this as follows:

This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It deserves to die.

Consider: If I suddenly decide I want to dial you up, I have no way of knowing whether you’re busy, and you have no idea why I’m calling. We have to open Schrödinger’s box every time, having a conversation to figure out whether it’s OK to have a conversation. Plus, voice calls are emotionally high-bandwidth, which is why it’s so weirdly exhausting to be interrupted by one. (We apparently find voicemail even more excruciating: Studies show that more than a fifth of all voice messages are never listened to.)

The telephone, in other words, doesn’t provide any information about status, so we are constantly interrupting one another. The other tools at our disposal are more polite. Instant messaging lets us detect whether our friends are busy without our bugging them, and texting lets us ping one another asynchronously. (Plus, we can spend more time thinking about what we want to say.) For all the hue and cry about becoming an “always on” society, we’re actually moving away from the demand that everyone be available immediately.[)]

Much of this has been so obviously true for some time that Thompson shouldn't need to write it and I should not need to blog about it. 

I'm interested in the next step here, though. Tons of my friends and virtually all of my coworkers have iPhones. But many do not like to enable instant messaging or their work email account on the phone. For them, it crosses a line in terms of their availability to the man. But having all of those tools available makes it so much easier for the rest of us to creatively cope with workload that depriving oneself of that flexibility seems absolutely insane to me. 

In old movies, people would take the phone off the hook when they didn't want to be reached. These days, we just don't answer every chat. 

What about you, dear readers? Does your smartphone keep you tethered to work, or help you get free?


img credit

Is that a 1 watt laser in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

"Warning: Extremely dangerous is an understatement to the power of 1W of laser power. It will blind permanently and instantly and set fire quickly to skin and other body parts."

Just $200 for a very dangerous and very cool looking laser. Paging Safety Neal, our resident expert, on the personal defense applications. 

This machine makes Mozart

Finally, Cope's program could divine what made Bach sound like Bach and create music in that style. It broke rules just as Bach had broken them, and made the result sound musical. It was as if the software had somehow captured Bach's spirit -- and it performed just as well in producing new Mozart compositions and Shakespeare sonnets. One afternoon, a few years after he'd begun work on Emmy, Cope clicked a button and went out for a sandwich, and she spit out 5,000 beautiful, artificial Bach chorales, work that would've taken him several lifetimes to produce by hand.

I'm going to try to get a hold of some of these computer-generated works and give you, dear readers, the official Bellman review. But in the meantime, I want to focus on what Jason Kottke said when he linked to the article about Cope:

Gosh it's going to get interesting when machines can do some real fundamental "human" things 10,000x faster and better than humans can.

Humanists, take note! This is not a threatening development.

First, let me posit that while Cope's work's works may not rise to the level of human genius, some algorithms will reach that benchmark during our lifetimes (except maybe your lifetime, Oldy McAbouttodie).

This assertion is not one most of my writer, artist, or musician friends agree with, but they (you?) are wrong, wrong wrong. It's inevitable.

Second, this is not a bad thing. Yes, there will be violent change to our idea of what makes a person or a particular work of art valuable or important. But this change will ultimately be for the better. How could being surrounded by the best art ever made, freshly baked each week, possibly be bad? Computers will find ways to reliably speak to our souls in ways that we rarely have.

And we will all be immensely--almost inconceivably--enriched. The future, she kicks ass.
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(img via Curved White)

sunday quotes vs. the black eye peas

via colihouse again

I heard “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black Eyed Peas while switching between radio stations in my car. The words “I got the that rock and roll, that future flow, that digital spit, next level visual shit” piqued my curiosity so I decided to listen to the rest. As the beat kicked in, I remembered sort of liking the Peas’ first album and dreamily wondered whether T-Pain and Kanye West have inspired an amazing new genre: cyber rap. Just as I was starting to smile at the prospect of a Funkadelic generation for the 21st century, Fergie’s brute battle screech crushed all my hopes of space-hop grandeur with just one verse: “I like that boom boom pow, them chickinz jackin’ my style, they try copy my swagger I’m on that next shit now”.
...
I like a little supersonic boom as much as the next guy, but until one of these Peas can be a little more specific about their zooming space shit I’m afraid I just don’t buy it. What exactly makes this song futuristic? Help me out. Until then I’ll try to avoid saying “You’re SOO two thousand and LATE” in my lexicon and look to the cosmos for answers.

I keep thinking Fergie is singing, "I got that fuchsia flow," which would be, you know, different.

"How quickly the world owes him something he didn't know existed until 10 seconds ago..."

It does put a few things in perspective.

(thanks to monk-ay)