In our presentation, Balancing Today and Tomorrow, we argue that white collar/service jobs are rapdily being replaced by machines. We point especially to the professions: starting with accountants, engineers and lawyers, but including architects, pilots and even doctors.
Now a report from New Scientist (2 April 2005) on software agents that will give PR advice (read full report here). These days it’s important to know what is being said about you. But finding out is becoming ever more difficult, with thousands of news outlets, websites and blogs to monitor. This new software, about to be released by a British company, Corpora, can automatically gauge the tone of any electronic document. It can tell with a report about you is positive or negative, or whether it is praising or damning you. This is a function that has often been managed by a PR department or firm, who reduced teams of people to read through everything written about an organisation, person, the event, product or issue. This is both expensive and slow. So it’s great news to hear that there is some software, using complex algorithms, that can do the same thing with about the same level of accuracy.
The program is called Sentiment, and should be available soon.