Not too long ago, there was a relatively long list of things machines couldn't do by themselves: play chess, read legal briefs, translate poetry, vacuum floors, drive cars, etc. But that list is getting shorter and shorter every year. The latest casualty may be writing newspaper articles. Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum at Northwestern's Intelligent Information …
Sports stories written by algorithm
Have you suspected for some time that most writing about sporting events is formulaic? Well, suspect no more! It is possible to have a computer write a sports story merely from the box score. No seriously. It is. And there is some pretty interesting business economics in that example. Some professors from Northwestern figured out …
Can Digital Technologies Replace Superstars?
Japan's newest pop star, Aimi Eguchi, is a digital creation. For the past couple of decades, digital technologies have been responsible for skill biased technical change, automating and replacing routine, low-skill work while augmenting the demand for more skilled workers. Bank tellers, clerks and assembly line workers were early targets of automation, while rock stars and CEOs benefited from being …
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Apple's 'Buy Your Way Out of Piracy' Office
At the WWDC Apple announced its iCloud suite of apps. One of them was ‘iTunes in the Cloud.’ This was a free service that allowed consumers who had purchased music through iTunes to download that music and sync in across multiple devices (including the iPhone, iPad and both Macs and PCs). This provided ease of …
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Google is putting the "auto" into automobile
If the last big revolution was replacing muscle power with machines, the next one is automating and augmenting more mental tasks. Henry Ford and compatriots replaced the horse, now Google is working to replace the driver. According to John Markoff in the New York Times, their self-driving cars have now logged over 140,000 miles on California …
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Technology Review Interview about IT and Innovation
Despite the vast amounts of computing and communication power in corporate hands, companies are at the early stages of using IT to revamp business practices, become more efficient, and drive the next wave of national productivity growth. That's the intro the an interview that David Talbot, Technology Review's chief correspondent, did with Erik Brynjolfsson last week. The first …
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Driving can't be frictionless, but can shopping for gas?
Pull into a parking lot, open the right [mobile] app and you may be able to save a dollar or two on your next fill-up. Over the course of a year, you might even save enough money for a decent meal out. That's from an article by Bob Tedeschi in the New York Times on an emerging …
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Digitopoly 