Journalist Robot - Friend or Foe?

 There's been so much bad news lately for journalists like myself with all those publications shrinking and disappearing, when I read about this robot, the first thing that came into my mind was "great, more competition." Am I eventually going to be competing with a robot to get news? 

 According to this article on Internet Watch (via Moriyama-san' Diary) a "Journalist Robot" was demonstrated in Tokyo at the Information Processing Society of Japan 50th Anniversary Event.

(Photo of Journalist Robot borrowed from Internet Watch )

 The robot is being developed at the ISI Lab at Tokyo University. (It's the same lab that did the Mowgli  and the humanoid that can get up on its own.)

 The Journalist Robot can detect what is new in the environment by comparing what it sees with data previously stored, move up to what it has detected and take photographs. Then it can search for people in that area and ask questions. The robot would have to know from previous input what exactly it has detected (examples of wine bottles and posters are given in the article), and then it will insert that word into question templates. ("Do you know who put up those wine bottles there?" -- I don't know, I'm just imaging here.) 

 And then if the robot thinks that the event is newsworthy, it will actually write up a piece.

 So there's not much detail and I really have to see this thing in person to know it's capabilities, but it looks like I don't have to worry about my job being taken over by it anytime soon. Yeah, it may be able to spell better than me with the on-board spell checker (or Kanji checker in Japanese), but it probably can't do --- well, let's see, what would I be able to do better than the robot........ Oh, I'd know which professor likes to drink more....... but isn't that just about how much knowledge you put into the robot?  OK, then I could ask more sophisticated questions in a nicer way........... but is that really necessary? Hmmmmm, this is difficult.

 What I'm sure is that I would have loved to have a future version of this robot 20 years ago as a cub reporter. There were evenings when I would have to wait in front of an executive's house for hours for him to come home so I can ask him about the pending merger or the upcoming bill. It was tough especially during the winter. If I had one of these waiting instead of me, it would have been a great help.  

 You can find the academic paper regarding the Journalist Robot here. The following pictures were borrowed from the Tokyo University joint research website.