# Rule of the robots moves forward...



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

"Microsoft is to replace dozens of contract journalists on its MSN website and use automated systems to select news stories, US and UK media report.

"The curating of stories from news organisations and selection of headlines and pictures for the MSN site is currently done by journalists.

"Artificial intelligence will perform these news production tasks, sources told the Seattle Times."


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

I’ll add that my wife had a Facebook post refused tonight without a notice why. It seemed to me pretty innocuous. The refusal was immediate, and so was pretty obviously done by a bot.

So now we have AIs “curating” our news to control what we can read, and censoring our online speech to control what we can say. This situation is not promising.


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## erki (Feb 17, 2020)

Free(as boundless) information is raw power and it is not surprising that some people/groups/governments desire to tap into it.
Although the idea to have some tool with intelligence to shift through to separate facts from fiction is sound(no human mind could do this), there will be such designer interests involved unavoidably. Now if we would have truly independent AI doing this job impartially without anybody's interest in mind we may get some useful results. However facts are often not just the facts - facts without a context. So any mechanical interpretation will be false in some degree as it depends of designed algorithm. But if we design an algorithm so complex that it could grasp all nuances the result would be useless again.
There is a real danger to leave information float free however - it could be used to trigger real physical events. We saw a good exercise this in "Arab Spring" where actions could be started and coordinated instantly in many locations. Also in Russia few years back used by opposition. And some "terrorist" attacks.
And finally on the note of replacing human workers with machines - I think we should have some kind of machine tax that would make this process less profitable.


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