The Nobel Prize in Literature 2025

A.I.

Yeah… this could happen! Now in 2016, some companies are using robots to feed us with news! Major media companies are turning to Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create and publish new articles for the public.

If you think that article writing is not worthy of a Nobel Prize, you are probably right. I was only exaggerating. But it is certainly worth a Pulitzer Prize! In fact some major media companies such as the Fox Group or the Associated Press are using automated writing to create new articles for their readers.

Think about this, the exact moment when you are exposed to the first online article informing you about an earthquake, or even the short message you receive on your smartphone just a few minutes after it, is most likely going to be produced without any direct human intervention. This is possible because (in a simple way) Artificial Intelligence connects servers with seismographs, translates and selects information to finally generate the news. Crazy! No? Ok… Another evidence of Artificial Intelligence in our press can be seen in a total different area. When you read articles about corporate earnings, these news pieces are the result of programs that follow thousands of companies and then automatically produce stories about their earnings reports.

You can be right… This entire paragraph on how AI helps you to be updated about natural disasters or the evolution of the earnings of some companies seems interesting but for sure not so “sexy”. But if you are a sports lovers, you will find what I am about to tell you very peculiar!

Do you know that some media companies are using AI to write articles about sports? It is true! Currently it concerns only a few minor leagues, but an organization like the Associated Press is actually using a software to write automatic articles about sports! It allows them to follow tens of thousands of games, analyze an enormous quantity of data concerning the players, teams and matches, select the most relevant ones, and… Boom! You have a sports article fully written by a machine.

Do you think this is the future? News regarding major leagues will be written by robots? Should sports journalists be worried? I think so… But who really knows?

Finally, as you all know (well you should!) we have the USA Presidential election! Who is going to win? Let’s wait. But this is not the main question. The main question is….what if Mrs. Clinton’s or Mr. Trump’s winning speech was written by a machine? The idea that the message of the future leader of the USA; a message that is shared by the press to millions of citizens, is the result of a robot’s work is so chilling! Well it is possible! It is not likely to happen… but an algorithm created by Valentin Kassarnig, who works at the MIT, allows us to generate great automatic speeches! He just made the life of our politicians much easier with this invention!

But do you think we will trust a robot to decide what to say? Probably not… I don’t know if those speeches will always be better that the ones written by humans, but I will at least give them a chance.

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Can AI benefit humanity as a whole?

While tech companies have been overpromising on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications would affect our daily lives for the past decade or so, it seems we have gotten to a point, where those science-fiction dream smart machines will soon be a reality. Algorithms and machine learning processes  get more advanced, larger and larger data sets become available, and processing power becomes more cost efficient. The result – autonomous cars, drones, augmented and virtual reality, robots, and many more.

No doubt about it: AI will have a significant impact on our future. But who will be involved in shaping that impact? When it comes to AI there are countless ethical, social moral and economic questions to be answered but who will answer them? What ethical code will a smart machine follow when it makes autonomous decisions? How to deal with a potential mass dislocation of labor when machine learning becomes sufficiently advanced? Will AI be used in warfare?

According to an article by John Markoff in the New York times some of the world’s largest and most prominent tech companies have started discussing the impact of AI on society and our world. These discussions are being led to ensure that AI research and development benefits humanity, rather than harm it. But IBM, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook are companies with agendas and a need to generate financial return. So while their effort is admirable, the industry alone should not be the only one setting a framework of regulations for AI development. It’s not new that policymakers and regulators lag technology. Governments will have to catch up soon and set their own regulations (Thank you Mr. President). There is another approach that goes beyond industry and politics, shaping our future with intelligent machines:

OpenAI is a non-profit organization that promotes the decentralization and democratization of AI research. The organization is funded by entrepreneur Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Altman and Musk think that AI is the most important technology that will most affect humanity’s future. Yet they are very outspoken that AI bears the potential to be an existential risk to society. By decentralizing, distributing and democratizing research into AI, Altman and Musk hope to prevent humanity’s destruction by an uncontrollable AI or a super intelligence in the hands of a small group of people who use it for their personal profit and gain. You say these thoughts sound a lot like the Terminator movies and their occurrence is unlikely? Maybe, but the democratization of research could also democratize the answering of all those complex questions related to the matter.

An apple a day keeps the computer away: could a robot diagnose diseases?

In the previous articles, we have already seen many trends involving artificial intelligence and their possible future applications: the way it may affect car companies and how could law firms benefit from this new technology. But what kind of improvements could a robot bring to the medical scene? Would you trust a robot when it comes to your personal health?

In 2010 IBM developed the first artificial intelligence that understands and answers to questions in natural language and uses machine learning to analyse unstructured data. Watson, the name of this technology, is able to quickly extract information from all kinds of documents and reveal insights, patterns and relationships across data. 

In its first application, Watson competed on Jeopardy! with its previous winners, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, and won the first price of $1 million. This was just a test to prove its capability of answering natural language questions…and of course it was a success!

After this trial, IBM started improving Watson’s capabilities and, at the moment, it has found several applications in law, finance and retail fields. It is also currently used in fantasy football in the US’ NFL! 

However, the main field in which Watson is currently working on is healthcare. With its cognitive system, it is able to analyse, understand, reason and learn data at a speed that humans could never reach.

Healthcare data doubles every 24 months and doctors do not have the possibility to keep up with these new insights. Watson is able to read 200 million pages in 3 seconds and understand unstructured data, something that current systems can’t do. It is able to diagnose a disease just by analysing the medical reports and comparing them with the new findings in the medical field.

Starting from 2011, several US clinics collaborated with IBM to utilize Watson to suggest treatments options for their patients. Since February 2013, it started collaborating with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on lung cancer treatment, and following this example many other oncological centers decided to use this artificial intelligence to improve the decision making process and to fasten diagnoses.

IBM itself, to promote Watson capabilities, decided to launch a program within the company to help its employees fighting cancer, in collaboration with “Best Doctors”, a clinical consultation provider.

As we have already mentioned, Watson has analytical capabilities that humans or current systems cannot reply in any way. It can suggest a diagnostic for a disease and leave the doctors to deal with the patient without wasting time in keeping up with the new medical findings.

This is going to be one of the most disruptive innovations for this field, but may also bring about new ethical questions. Would you let a robot diagnose your disease and indirectly decide the best possible treatment for your health? Will the position of a traditional doctor become obsolete in the following years?