News Reporter = Worst Job in 2013?
Time to Outsource, Then Automate? :(
So, the Koch bros are buying newspapers?
Their assumed arbitrage op is that labor will get tight enough that starving journalists will soon PAY to have their articles published.
(News as an automated lottery? with "winners" rewarded by elites?)
(Does that sound vaguely familiar?)
Once labor rates follow interest rates into negative territory ... cannibalism could soon follow? That can be automated too. By drones, no less.
Note Michael Frayn’s 1965 comic The Tin Men:
It is set at an Institute for the Automation of Human Life and the characters are constantly conjecturing the possibilities
“When you come to think about it, you could programme a computer to appreciate the cricket results for you — or even to appreciate the actual automated game as the playing computer played it. … . So far as I can see, appreciation is a finite activity, which means it’s a programmable one. The spectator is eminently replaceable.”
“But ... the spectator enjoys watching.”
“He may I suppose, but that’s rather beside the point. The hydraulic press operator who is replaced by a computer when his factory is automated may enjoy operating a hydraulic press. But that doesn’t save him from being replaced. A human being, my dear Rowe, is far too complex and expensive an instrument to be wasted on simple finite tasks like operating presses, filling up football pools and watching cricket. The whole world of sport, I believe, will gradually become an entirely enclosed one, unvisited by any human being except the maintenance engineers. Computers will play. Computers will watch. Computers will comment. Computers will store results, and pit their memories against other computers in sports quiz programmes on the television organised by computers and watched by computers.”
Why not turn Politics into an Automatic Stabilizer App? Now THAT would make sense. The lobbyists too. Then we complex & expensive humans could get back to exploring our options and SELECTING from them 100% of the time.
So, the Koch bros are buying newspapers?
Their assumed arbitrage op is that labor will get tight enough that starving journalists will soon PAY to have their articles published.
(News as an automated lottery? with "winners" rewarded by elites?)
(Does that sound vaguely familiar?)
Once labor rates follow interest rates into negative territory ... cannibalism could soon follow? That can be automated too. By drones, no less.
Note Michael Frayn’s 1965 comic The Tin Men:
It is set at an Institute for the Automation of Human Life and the characters are constantly conjecturing the possibilities
“When you come to think about it, you could programme a computer to appreciate the cricket results for you — or even to appreciate the actual automated game as the playing computer played it. … . So far as I can see, appreciation is a finite activity, which means it’s a programmable one. The spectator is eminently replaceable.”
“But ... the spectator enjoys watching.”
“He may I suppose, but that’s rather beside the point. The hydraulic press operator who is replaced by a computer when his factory is automated may enjoy operating a hydraulic press. But that doesn’t save him from being replaced. A human being, my dear Rowe, is far too complex and expensive an instrument to be wasted on simple finite tasks like operating presses, filling up football pools and watching cricket. The whole world of sport, I believe, will gradually become an entirely enclosed one, unvisited by any human being except the maintenance engineers. Computers will play. Computers will watch. Computers will comment. Computers will store results, and pit their memories against other computers in sports quiz programmes on the television organised by computers and watched by computers.”
Why not turn Politics into an Automatic Stabilizer App? Now THAT would make sense. The lobbyists too. Then we complex & expensive humans could get back to exploring our options and SELECTING from them 100% of the time.
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