20 Minutes into the Future

The A.I. alter ego of fictional reporter Edison Carter.

Will we move into an age where the evening news anchor has been replaced by an algorithm?

When I read “Data is (are) journalism” at the Buzz Machine, I thought of the Cyberpunk movie (and television series) Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into the Future from the 1980s. In the film reporter Edison Carter was replaced by an artificial intelligence, (A.I.)  Max Headroom, after he uncovered his network was involved in a shady advertising scheme.

Today we already have algorithms (programs) that taken the place of a wire editor with sites like Google News and tools such as Publish 2. In both cases a human interacts with the algorithm to supply keywords and the program compiles the latest news on the subject. The remaining steps left would be to send the stories to a teleprompter-ish program to ingest the news and have an avatar read the news.

What do you think – Would you want your news delivered by 2,073,600 pixels organized to simulate a person reading news that has been aggregated by an algorithm?