Routine Information Sharing

Looks like litbots and databases will soon be providing routine updates of structured information to human readers via newspapers and news websites in the form of machine written articles. Narrative Science is the company behind it.

Pretty soon, such litbots will be conversing with my own personal litbots, and negotiating the purchase of routine items I need and can afford, according to the budget I set and the priorities I identify. The prospect of the online grocery appears again: I need milk, eggs, and in-season fruit every Tuesday, for delivery Wed. afternoon. The grocery’s litbot can check my calendar to make sure I’m not out of town before preparing the order, and perhaps humans will select the peaches to ensure they’re not bruised.

Goldsmith’s already supplies quantum tables for classes of injuries. Can’t an enterprising lawyer automate the delivery of this information? DivorceMate, so slyly named, supplies this kind of information to lawyers and their clients, but not very efficiently at present.

At this rate, lawyers, journalists, and many other professions will be looking at the same challenges Librarians are facing now: dropping or automating the clerical aspects of their work and concentrating on more sophisticated services requiring higher levels of expertise.