Defeating Skynet with creativity and flexibility

If journalists lose their jobs to the robots, they only have themselves to blame.

Recently on NPR's Fresh Air, Dave Davies interviewed author Martin Ford about his new book, "Rise Of The Robots: Technology And The Threat Of A Jobless Future." Journalists have been hearing about robot-written stories for a long time, and many news agencies, like Forbes, have been using automated content production for years.
As Ford told Davies:

They're generating thousands and thousands of stories. In fact, the number I heard was about one story every 30 seconds is being generated automatically. And they appear on a number of websites and in the news media. Forbes is one that we know about. Many of the others that use this particular service aren't eager to disclose of that.

Ford even went so far as to read a computer-produced sports piece, written by software and published online:

Things looked bleak for the Angels when they trailed by two runs in the ninth inning, but Los Angeles recovered thanks to a key single from Vladimir Guerrero to pull out a 7-6 victory over the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday. Guerrero drove in two Angel runners. He went 2-4 at the plate. Quote, "when it comes down to honoring Nick Adenhart, what happened in April in Anaheim, yes, it was probably the biggest hit of my career," Guerrero said, "because I'm dedicating that to a former teammate, a guy that passed away"

Ford does not discuss who actually input the data itself — how the computer obtained the quote — but a future in which "journalism" consists merely of obtaining data and feeding it, punch-card-style, into Multivac is totally possible, and not too far off.

What's the solution? How do we forestall the robot apocalypse? How do we stop Skynet before the Terminator is sent back in time to kill Johannes Gutenberg?

First of all, I say, we have only ourselves and our inflexibility to blame. That software-written sports story above, or a million sports and news pieces like it, might have been written by any sports or news reporter across the country, and it has.

Journalism, perhaps owing to the sense of importance felt so strongly by journalists, has long become formulaic, more a matter of automobile assembly than the painting of a masterpiece, or the interpretation of that masterpiece.

I think the solution — at least the short-term solution (long-term, the robots will win) — is to shed tell that gamer in a completely new and inviting way. Tell that town budget story in a way a robot couldn't conceive of. The robots can write what happened, but it is up to us to explain why it mattered, and to tell the story in a way that convinces readers of that fact.

That, a robot cannot do, yet.