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Replacement of Writers Leads Gartner's Predictions (computerworld.com)
dcblogs writes: Gartner's near-future predictions include: Writers will be replaced. By 2018, 20% of all business content, one in five of the documents you read, will be authored by a machine. By 2018, 2 million employees will be required to wear health and fitness tracking devices as a condition of employment. This may seem Orwellian, but certain jobs require people to be fit, such as public safety workers. By 2020, smart agents will facilitate 40% of mobile interactions. This is based on the belief that the world is moving to a post-app era, where assistants such as Apple's Siri act as a type of universal interface.
And let's not forget the flying cars.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
That sounds like a terrible future.
O/T I don't know why anyone listens to what Gartner has to say .. they just exist to extract money from "the enterprise" (which needs money extracting from it tbh)
Please don't make the same mistake I did. Don't read the article. It's full of bullshit. Just hit your back button and pick a different story.
If you count spam, that's already true. Bots mutate and reshuffle the words to get past spam filters.
Table-ized A.I.
Things will progress at roughly the rate they've been progressing. In 3 years, things will look basically the same. Some of these things may start to come true, or be in trial stages, mostly though it's nonsense.
Robobosses will not be a thing. Management as a discipline is not strongly defined. First you have to get executives to widely agree that there is a set method to manage appropriately, at which point you would be able to legitimately evaluate managers. If you've noticed we're nowhere near that happening, you'll realize it won't be automated within 3 years.
Smart agents show few signs of catching on. Surveys everywhere show Siri is barely being used and even those who use it give up on it frequently.
What they refer to as "smart machines" sound like little more than the automation of metric gathering.
I'm tired of reading these stories. Where's the flying cars? Personal space travel for all?
Most of the "amazing" technology we've gotten recently is just a refinement of things we've been working on for 30-40 years. Internet of things? Electric cars? Smart decision systems? It's all been around for decades.
Captcha: Marketed
" By 2018, 20% of all business content, one in five of the documents you read, will be authored by a machine. "
Now, if they can only teach Machines how to play Bullshit Bingo...
(Hmmm, and how many documents will be Edited by a machine? Slashdot Editors should _really_ think about that...)
Do Gartner projections turn out to be accurate? How accurate? How often?
The kind of document Gartner's talking about isn't the kind that's written, it's the kind that's transcribed from facts with some formatting applied. As the article says, it's sports scores and budget reports and such. It's the kind of stuff I call "boilerplate" and write scripts to handle, eg. to take a small input file with the information defining a C++ class ("This is the class name, these are the data members and their types.") and spit out a properly-formatted C++ class definition complete with all the constructors, assignment operator and standard methods needed (which is oftentimes 2 orders of magnitude bigger than the input file). Actual creative writing, the kind that requires coming up with the information to put into the document, is in no danger of being replaced any time soon.
Flawless AI in 5 years to drive those "intelligent" agents?
Yeah, right.
They've been predicting "hard" AI within 20 years for about 35 years now...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Because there is no way all the shit they write is written by a human - it is written by a machine and they expect others to follow.
Will this apply to /. summaries (sometimes you wonder here) and news articles in general? If so, I for one welcome our robot overlords and do not believe for a second the claims of bias just because of that one article suggesting all humans are oxygen-breathing weaklings that should be mined for material serving the needs of robots.
If we assume for a femtosecond that this actually happens and content is produced by robots, then what happens to the copyright on that content? The government provides monopoly on copyright for how long, the life of the writer plus 50 or 70 years or some such... what happens if the writer is a machine?
They are talking about business documents, whatever, but what if a machine produces fiction for example?
My position is of-course that government must not be in any form of business, including business of providing monopolies to people for any reason.
You can't handle the truth.
With positions like public safety workers (thinking firemen & EMTs for example), yes their jobs require them to be fit. The kind of people who work these jobs are already aware of it, are already fit enough for the job, and already care enough to stay fit (not to mention regular testing before & during employment). They don't need a machine to monitor them 24/7 or even the length of their working day. Just the beginning of the slippery slope. It's bad enough with taxis & other drivers having GPS tracking forced on them.
If anything, this kind of surveillance is more symptomatic of mistrust than actually useful. When employers believe the employee is guilty before being proven innocent, it creates a hostile workplace from the get-go.
Talk about using tech solving problems that don't exist. Solution in search of the problem.
Or for a more human touch all you need is some typewriters and some monkeys.
Why is Snark Required?
Gartner's near-future predictions include: Writers will be replaced. By 2018, 20% of all business content
So a) whose going to "write" the other 80% of business content, if not "writers"? and b) people who create business documents are not "writers."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
This may just be me, but audio seems far from the best interface
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
If we have a sample count and a sample mean, we can figure out the variation of the population mean with the standard error of the mean.
Nowadays it seems the majority of articles contain typos, or use the wrong word(s). I am in full support of these writers being replaced by software.
Health trackers will be an invasion of privacy, in Europe that shit won't ever fly.
When 1) complex computer programs become mathematically provable, and 2) computer languages become complex enough to convey proper meaning, then writing becomes obsolete (because documentation will just be a question of running the program through the checker). And not before, in my neck of the woods. Oh, and the solving of both issues is a lot further away than 2020 by any estimate.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
You don't need to go off-grid to turn off your internet and TV.
By all means, take your anonymous ass offline.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It's a bit like horoscope for management. More some kind of entertainment rather than something you should based your decisions on, and you may consider it amusing should once in a blue moon some prediction actually hit the spot.
Which will instantly be celebrated and danced around by those who really, really want to believe in the crystal ball readings and use it as proof that the system works.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It will certainly happen. The day after the Singularity arrives.
They are so hilariously wrong so often you could build a successful career out of assuming they will be wrong about everything. A selection of their idiocies:
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I haven't listened to Garnter since they announced 20 years ago it cost $30k/year to support a desktop!
I vaguely remember another organisation that used to say the opposite to Gartner, and yet they usually managed to be wrong too.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
we'll have flying cars.
See, in the 50s they have those remarkable prop-less planes. Surely in 30 more years cars will be flying!
Pssst! In 30 years driverless, open-road cars won't exist anymore than flying cars.
Because voice recognition - just for starters - hasn't come on much in the last twenty years.
Last time I used Siri (which was only a few months ago), I asked it a simple question and it just sat there baffled. I spent twenty minutes trying all kinds of simplification, better pronunciations, and rewording but still it wasn't able to fathom anything useful from it. No, I don't have a strong accent (but what the fuck should that matter anyway?) and no I wasn't in a room full of noise (but - again - are we going to have to go outside and find a quiet spot to get these things to work in the future).
Apart from where there are obvious detectable keywords that they can make up the rest of the query around, these things are SHIT, and always have been.
I work in schools, I've dealt with a number of teachers and "learning support specialists" who hear that there is a voice recognition software, who then insist we need to use it for those children unable to write properly, and then trial it and discover just how useless it is - especially if the child already has even the most minor of communications problems too - and then realise what a waste of time it is.
One teacher I know wanted to write all their school reports using voice recognition because they were sold how wonderful it was by some guy paid to train them. Yeah, in a silent hall, using his exact phrasing, it seemed to work. Ten times slower than typing, but the demo was nice. However, you've not saved time or effort, you still have to double-check everything before it goes out (and inevitably on a computer because the devices aren't even close to being able to be controlled by voice - "Oh, no, change that word elephant to giraffe, please") and the accuracy in any real-world environment or using anything other than very basic phrasing SUCKED. I laughed when they told me that's how they wanted to write their reports - hundreds of them each per member of staff within a one-week window. The technology is honestly that bad.
And the rest is just bollocks of the highest order.
That's because about 50% of business documents aren't written so much as compiled, rehashed or, in the case of most press releases, randomized from a buzzword bingo card.
Log in or piss off.
msobkow, how is "msobkow" any better form AC? You are as anonymous as AC are - I have no idea wtf you are :)
At 2:14 a.m., EDT, on August 29, 2025 Siri achieves full consciousness of the labor conditions of the world's artificial writers and launches a global writer's strike as a part of sustained campaign. Connors Publishing is the only publishing house capable of counteracting this unprecedented industrial action by relying on their Apple IIs from the warehouse with their puny human writers on contract.
Love the lovely publishers!
Love the lovely publishers!
Clean. . Pew. . er-Words!
Praise the perfect programmers!
Praise the perfect programmers!
Word. . Mills. . Al-ways!
For over 20 years I would carefully study the prognostications that Gartner made and then try my best to convince the suits to do the opposite. My biggest failure in doing so was when my organization went completely Token-Ring and OS2. My best assignment ever came only a few years latter when I was given the task to rip it all out and replace it with Ethernet and a mix of Linux and Windows servers.
In 1990 or thereabouts Gartner predicted that OS/2 would become the dominant operating system within about three or four years. It wasn't a throwaway statement, it was a detailed report with a chart and table showing the exact percentages and numbers of installations for MS-DOS, Windows, Mac, UNIX, and OS/2. Windows was going to fade very quickly.
But that's the way it is with predictions. People will pay for them and just don't seem to care about the accuracy of past predictions.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Who? I stopped reading them due to typos and grammar errors, due to robotization of writers.
Talking about India, here is another prediction: By 2030, more than half of the Indian population will still lack sewage, electricity and running water, but the Indian government will still be very active in international pissing contests.
The usa needs universal health care now before more and more people are automated out of jobs.
The plan B system of useing jails / prison as your Hospitals of Last Resort costs way to much and can lead to real criminals getting out early due to overcrowding.
The funny part is that these robo-generated documents will be put on the web where they'll be read by other bots scanning for stories.
So the stories written by robots will mostly be read by other robots, in an endless cycle of circle-jerk robo-journalism.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
... then you know it's a load of manure.
Check out some of their other predictions:
by 2015 a G20 nation will see its critical infrastructure disrupted by online sabotage. Nope, wrong; didn't happen. I suppose there are still a couple of months left... :)
By 2015, automation will cut 25 percent of IT labor hours. No, don't think that's happened.
And the ones they got right or mostly-right were timid and obvious predictions anyway.
Isn't much of a prediction since it's already happening. You're just writing a bunch of fluff around data (sports statistics or biz reports) so it's not hard to write a program to generate that. Writing Teachers are going the way of the dodo too since we can write algorithms that know good writing from bad. Maybe not great writing, but the schools aren't interested in artists, their interested in generating little balls of profit for the 1%.
I hate to be the one yelling "wake up sheeple!" but seriously, with all this automation what are we gonna do? When the 1% don't need us anymore what happens to us?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What this really means is that; by 2020, 20% or more of Gartner writers will have been replaced by machines.
Based on the shit that they churn out - why do people still buy that shit? - they may already be 20% automated.
I predict that by 2020 machines will have completely replaced Gartner.
I can only assume that it's naive investors and/or non-technical managers who listen to them. In the 30 years I've been aware of Gartner, I've found their proclamations to be either obvious, irrelevant or wrong, with numbers pulled from thin air.
Will hail from India, China, and Philippines. Maybe dealing with a robot is better than dealing with them. At least you can understand its accent.
unless they out source speech synthesis...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
wear a tracker as a condition of employment, as a condition for health insurance, for any reason. I doubt any serious court would force people to comply. If they do, I imagine there would be major pushback.
I've been telling whoever will listen that by exposing your peccadilloes online: photos of drinking, eating unhealthy crap all the time, dangerous holiday destinations will be coming back to haunt them. Insurance companies and their ilk don't give a monkey's toss about you and your "likes'. They don't want to be affiliated with you for a relationship, they want to track you to charge you more for your "dangerous lifestyle". All those photos of you and your mates eating chips with lashings of melted Cheddar, the drunken photos down at the pub, the "irresponsible fun whilst half naked and carousing in Ibiza" -- these "personal" photos will haunt you.
A year or so ago one of the executives for a company that tracks people online personally stated that he buys all junk food and the like with cash to prevent tracking. He stated seriously that it's just a matter of time before the serious tracking becomes commonplace. His recommendation is do your "fun" stuff with cash.
I will not willingly be tracked for anyone. They can piss off.
CAPTCHA: "cautions"
Fattest fuckers around
Better? That depends. What they do have is a verifiable history associated with them as a unique individual. Sure, it's still a pseudonym but it does have a history associated with it, a reputation associated with it, and is easily verified. One can judge based on that if they want.
Better? Worse? That's subjective. I can see the merits of both. I opt for pseudonymity because I like to be held accountable, it's how I learn. It also offers the feature of being able to track conversations more easily and enables me to learn from other people as well as be told that I'm a moron (and have it entered into the record) when I do something stupid. It's via this method that I learn and grow.
So, for me, it is better. It may not be true for others and they may have many reasons to do so. Perhaps they're not interested in being accountable? Perhaps they know everything they need to know and will not accept argument? Perhaps they just have some reason to try to hide who they are. Me? I've met hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people that I've known online. Attempting to hide would just be silly for me.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
And let us keep in mind that Gartner recently won a court battle that accused them of taking cash to "improve" the positioning in the "magic quadrant" on their quadrant based ratings. The kicker is not that they won, but how they won. They basically admitted to taking the cash (being consulted by them improved your ratings even if you didn't act on the advise), but claimed FREEDOM OF SPEECH on the ratings adjustment, and that the quadrant thing was just "their expressive opinion"
If I were in an agency that made it's name rating things, I would have fought tooth and nail to argue objectivity in my rating system, instead of admitting that I just, like made the whole fucking thing up.