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April 14, 2008
Automated customized research
The New York Times is running a story about an automated book "writer" -- He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work):
Philip M. Parker seems to have licked that problem [of actually writing]. Mr. Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, “the most published author in the history of the planet.” And he makes money doing it.
However, what Parker is selling is not books, but customized research:
these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Mr. Parker a compiler than an author. Mr. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.
For more, see his video: YouTube - Patent on "Long Tail" for automated content authorship.
So, at this stage I don't think authors have much to worry about. Researcher (like me), however, might be in trouble. On the other hand, maybe people like me are actually the customers for this type of customized, on-demand reports. They might provide the basic information that a research assistant would normally come up. So it may be the lower level research assistant that is displaced. Yet another example that if your job can be routinized, it can be either done offshore in a low wage country or automated (see Levy and Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market).
By the way, Parker thinks that authors might be displaced by his method in the future. According to the Times story:
He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.
And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”
Somehow, however, I don't think that major authors have anything to worry about (unless, of course, it is true what writing instructors tend to deny -- best selling novels are all based on a standard formula). We will see.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at April 14, 2008 11:37 AM
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