Well, it seems just as I was finishing up an article about how we need a new App for the iPad to tell users if their resumes can get past the algorithm reading the resume for the human resource director at the corporation - an interesting article appeared in the New York Times along the same line of thinking. You see, as a writer, I've always realized that soon I will be replaced by artificial intelligent writing software programs, and I'd say the writing is already on the wall, and has been for quite a while now.
Indeed, there was a very telling article in the New York Times on June 10, 2012 titled; "The Algorithm Didn't Like My Essay," by Randall Stross which stated;
"The standardized tests administered by the states at the end of the school year typically have an essay-writing component, requiring the hiring of humans to grade them one by one. This spring, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation sponsored a competition to see how well algorithms submitted by professional data scientists and amateur statistics wizards could predict the scores assigned by human graders. The winners were announced last month - and the predictive algorithms were eerily accurate."
Now then, let's say you are writing an essay for your college entrance exam and that essay will be read by an algorithm to check for spelling, grammatical errors, content, and competence. You will be competing to impress a machine, not a human being with emotion, that's a whole different ball-game, thus, you may decide that rather than have your parents help you with that essay or in some cases they end up writing the whole thing, perhaps you need an AI writing program with just the right algorithms to get it through.
It's your algorithm against the one reading the essay, and against all the other students who'd purchased writing software too. Look, I don't condone any of this, and see it much the same as Google needing to upgrade their search algorithms to deal with sneaky SEO bandits trying to game their search engine, nevertheless, this whole thing looks to me to a digital battle in the making, and I'd go ahead and call it the; Algorithm Wars.
Question is; will there actually be any winners in this game? Or will we all end up losing our ability to write, or compete, as the machines can be the only winner in this, well, at least one machine at a time, you just have to hope you are on the right side of the field that time around. Anyway, good luck getting into college, and I'd advise that you learn computer science and how to write algorithms before the computers start writing those too. Please consider all this and think on it.
Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of eBooks on Future Concepts. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net/
