A lighter look at automation.
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Washington Post / Hey - that's my job you're automating / Michael Kinsley
Hey - that's my job you're automating
Opinion Michael Kinsley
Michael Kinsley
Google, the popular Internet search engine, offers a page called Google
News, a summary of what's going on in the world produced entirely by
computers. Well, I say "entirely," but Google's computers don't actually
gather the news. What they do is scan thousands of other Web pages and,
using a secret formula, decide what the top stories are. Then they cleverly
lift headlines and other material from different news sources, add links to
these sites, and come up with what appears to be the Web site of an
extremely cosmopolitan newspaper.It's slightly a bluff. Who knows why the
computers chose to feature a New Zealand news site the other day as a way of
covering the Miss World imbroglio in Nigeria? But you have to suspect that
the explanation lies in the crudeness of the computer's judgment, not its
sophistication. Google concedes that its choices of stories and news sources
are "occasionally unusual and contradictory," but insists with
uncharacteristic pomposity, "it is exactly th!
is variety that makes Google News a valuable source of information on the
important issues of the day."
Which is humbug. People still do it better. But not by much. The day is
clearly approaching when editors can be replaced by computers. This requires
some urgent rethinking.
Throughout the revolution of technology and globalization that has been
going on for two decades, responsible mainstream commentators, pundits,
analysts and gasbags (including this one) have taken the view that progress
is a good thing. Some people are unfortunately caught in the gears of
change, but society as a whole benefits. The losers in this process deserve
sympathy and help, but special pleading must not be allowed to slow this
process.
We must distinguish, however, between special pleading and legitimate alarm
about deeply troubling developments. It is one thing to sacrifice auto
workers on the altar of progress. It is quite another to start throwing
journalists into the flames. And the difference is? Well, it's very
different. Completely different . . . because . . . well . . . I'm a
journalist. This puts the situation in a new perspective.
You see, journalists are responsible for reporting and analyzing the
"important issues of the day," as the Googlies so eloquently put it. In the
prestige ranking of important issues, a key factor is how much an issue
actually touches anyone's daily life. The more abstract an issue is from
real life, the more prestigious it is. A journalistic career that began
covering tornadoes in Iowa and ended writing editorials about the expansion
of membership in NATO would be considered a success. One that took the
opposite path would not.
We all agree - do we not? - that globalization and technological change
remain vitally important issues. In order to ensure their continued
vitality, therefore, it is essential to guarantee that journalists not be
affected in any way. Abstraction from reality is not just a tradition among
journalists: It is an ethical imperative. If an issue actually affects a
journalist directly, you see, it becomes a "conflict of interest," which
must be avoided. So you see why we cannot allow technological progress to
start displacing journalists. The entire subject would become a conflict of
interest.
And what about the computers' conflict of interest? Sure, they're playing it
pretty straight now, as the Google folks note. But what happens when all the
human editors have been eliminated? We know the answer from the movie 2001:
We will wake up one day to find that all the news is about the parochial
concerns of computers ("White House Hard Drives Not Backed Up, Sources Say")
while important human developments involving the war on terrorism or
Leonardo DiCaprio get ignored.
No doubt there are writers and policy analysts and consultants of all sorts
who think today, "They're going after editors, but I can never be replaced
by a machine." Ladies and gentlemen, that's what the editors thought.
The Guardian Weekly 20-2-1212, page 29
