Automatic writing

In the Guardian:

The book-writing machine works simply, at least in principle. First, one feeds it a recipe for writing a particular genre of book - a tome about crossword puzzles, say, or a market outlook for products. Then hook the computer up to a big database full of info about crossword puzzles or market information. The computer uses the recipe to select data from the database and write and format it into book form.

Parker estimates that it costs him about 12p to write a book, with, perhaps, not much difference in quality from what a competent wordsmith or an MBA might produce.

Nothing but the title need actually exist until somebody orders a copy. At that point, a computer assembles the book's content and prints up a single copy.

Among Parker's bestselling books (as ranked by Amazon.co.uk) one finds surprises.

His fifth-best seller is Webster's Albanian to English Crossword Puzzles: Level 1.

Comments

[Jim]

This is interesting. What with this and every other robot cutting out a laborer, I figure someday there'll be six or seven billion people on the planet with nothing to do. And you know how idle minds are the devil's workshop...

[Yiri]

Well, mankind has already been too clever for it's own good - there are actually humans alive, today, in the year 2008, on Earth, who claim to be 'a little bit frightened' by the thought that machines may 'one day' surpass humans on every conceivable level.

Machines already HAVE surpassed us, long ago.

Take the most versatile supercomputer you can find, and people will say: hey, but does it walk up and down the stairs without falling and breaking itself?

Aye, we're so smart... you can emulate the decisions and consequences that a regular human being accumulates before 'it' expires, and if you would buy the best of the best, you'd have a system that will waste most of it's time cycling and doing nothing... still, if you'd have to get insurance, just in case the system gets damaged or broken beyond your ability to restore it - well, good luck!

However, if you'd take an actual HUMAN to do your stuff, you can easily wipe it out once it no longer serves your purposes... Since humans are so much 'better' and so much more adaptive on a real-time basis in an organic environment, they have become expendible to a point where building a machine to do the work that a slave can do for free... well, it would be ridiculous...

The slave doesn't cost any money, and is easily dispatched at the end of whatever you need it's abilities for.

I'm beginning to wonder why one would even consider further technological development to make machines that shall one day be 'intelligent' enough to be just as versatile and just as easily replacable as them feeble milk-suckers,... the humans.

[Jared]

I anxiously await the development of a computer that can compose music like Mozart or write plays like Shakespeare.