The future looks scary

First we had eBooks but now we have eJournalists - a company called Narrative Science has found a way to program a computer to write news stories. Does this mean that flesh and blood reporters are about to go the way of the dodo?

Thus far, the stories produced by Narrative Science programs concentrate on sports and finance, both areas that are heavy into numerical data. One can presumably feed the facts of a baseball game or a corporate quarterly report into a computer and out spits a story ready to go. Even the tone of the story can be tweeked, from dry analytical to intense and breathless.

Could we one day see a eNovelist? Will we ever seen a program that churns out novels in a given genre? If we do then my bet is that James Patterson will get the sole rights to the program and release 989 novels a day, that's three more, I think, than his current output.