Readers know I have long had a cyber-crush on Watson, the IBM computer. I was lucky enough to meet him shortly after his historic Jeopardy match and was completely charmed by his capabilities. My friend who works at IBM - the same one who got us in to meet Watson - recently gave me a book called "Final Jeopardy: Man Vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything." It is basically about the development of this amazing super-computer.
Last night I came upon a paragraph that confirmed a fear that I have until this point just been joking about. Stephen Baker, the author, is describing the wide-ranging intellect of David Ferrucci, the chief scientist of the team that developed Watson. Baker included this comment, almost as an aside: "Early in his tenure at IBM he and a friend tried, in their spare time, to teach a machine to write fiction by itself. They trained it for various literary themes, from love to betrayal, and they named it Brutus, for Julius Caesar's traitorous comrade."
Computers writing literature?! Replacing authors?! What next? Et tu, Watson?
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