Für gewöhnlich ist mir der Technologie-Pessimismus von Evgeny Morozov eine wenig too much. In diesem Artikel für Slate, trifft er den Nagel allerdings auf den Kopf, was eine mögliche Gefahr von automatisiertem Journalismus betrifft: Was für eine Welt wäre es, wenn jeder Artikel aufgrund der Interessen und der Bildung des Lesers individuell generiert würde? Eine, deren Grad der gesellschaftlichen Atomisierung noch einmal vervielfacht würde. Scary.

Until recently, many Internet critics have feared that such personalization of the Internet may usher in a world in which we see only articles that reflect our existent interests and never venture outside of our comfort zones. Social media, with its never-ending flurry of links and mini-debates, have made some of these concerns obsolete. But the rise of “automated journalism” may eventually present a new and different challenge, one that the excellent discovery mechanisms of social media cannot solve yet: What if we click on the same link that, in theory, leads to the same article but end up reading very different texts?How will it work? Imagine that my online history suggests that I hold an advanced degree and that I spend a lot of time on the websites of the Economist or the New York Review of Books; as a result, I get to see a more sophisticated, challenging, and informative version of the same story than my USA Today-reading neighbor. If one can infer that Im also interested in international news and global justice, a computer-generated news article about Angelina Jolie might end by mentioning her new film about the war in Bosnia. My celebrity-obsessed neighbor, on the other hand, would see the same story end with some useless gossipy tidbit about Brad Pitt.

via Narrative Science, robot journalists, customized news, and the danger to civil discourse. – Slate Magazine.

Dyson: We have created this expanding computational universe, and it’s open to the evolution of all kinds of things. It’s cycling faster and faster, and it’s way, way, way more than doubling in scale every year. Even with the help of Google and YouTube and Facebook, we can’t consume it all. And we aren’t really aware what this vast space is filling up with. From the human perspective, computers are idle 99 percent of the time, just waiting for the next instruction. While they’re waiting for us to come up with instructions, more and more computation is happening without us, as computers write instructions for each other. And as Turing showed mathematically, this space can’t be supervised. As the digital universe expands, so does this wild, undomesticated side.

Wired: If this is true, what’s the takeaway?
Dyson: Hire biologists! It doesn’t make sense for a high tech company to have 3,000 software engineers but no biologists.

Wired: One last question: What do you mean by “Turing’s cathedral”?
Dyson: In Turing’s 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” he argued that when we build intelligent machines, we will not be creating souls but building the mansions for the souls that God creates. When I first visited Google, right about the time it went public, I walked around and saw what they were doing and realized they were building a very large distributed AI, much as Turing had predicted. And I thought, my God, this is not Turing’s mansion—this is Turing’s cathedral. Cathedrals were built over hundreds of years by thousands of nameless people, each one carving a little corner somewhere or adding one little stone. That’s how I feel about the whole computational universe. Everybody is putting these small stones in place, incrementally creating this cathedral that no one could even imagine doing on their own.

via Q&A: Hacker Historian George Dyson Sits Down With Wireds Kevin Kelly | Wired Magazine | Wired.com.