Monografico_4_EN_Doxa_27

1. Introduction

March 17, 2014. An earthquake, 4.4 degrees makes Los Angeles (USA) tremble. So far nothing is out of the ordinary. Al-though, the world of journalism that very day, and for that very reason, was going to be shaken by a profound reflection on the prospects for the future of journalism. The incredible difference with this news event was that the first news emitted, just three minutes after it happened, did not come from a human journalist, but from an algorithm from the American newspaper the Los Angeles Times, created by the programmer Ken Schwencke, which is able to generate its own short arti-cles. This AI feeds on reliable and official pre-programmed sources and is not only able to publish news of earthquakes, but also about crime in the city, among other topics, although always under the supervision and hierarchy of those responsible for the newspaper. This simple news went around the world and made those media that had not yet bet on this type of technology, begin to seriously consider it.

It is a fact that AI and robotics are provoking an unprecedented revolution that affects all social and professional spheres. In the near future this impact will increase at an exponential rate and provoke what many call the Fourth Industrial Revolu-tion. Robots and AI will help in the automation and improvement of many of the manual processes we do today. However, these technologies bring with them fears and bewilderment arising from their rapid emergence and disinformation. The field of Communication will not escape this global trend. Forms of AI will help the communicator to improve processes and provide the public with more personalized, content-rich news (Jaemin, 2017).

Firstly, before starting to analyse the main questions of this article, it is necessary to explain what an algorithm is. The AI that is currently writing news. It is a set of rules that, applied systematically to appropriate input data, solve a problem in a finite number of elementary steps (Berlanga de Jesús, 2016). More specifically, it would be defined as a series of simple instructions that they carry out to solve a problem. With this in mind, one might ask why this mathematical algorithm, apparently lacking in creativity and consciousness, is creating this social impact. This fear of society in general to face this kind of technology. The answer is to be found not only in science, but also in the historical evolution of the Human Being and in the literature and cinematography of the 20th century, classified as Science-Fiction.

1.1. Science Fiction as a premonitory scenario for current technologies

Robots are no strangers to us, even the most evolved. They have been present in our literature and cinematography for some time (García, 2014). These images, the ones imagined from books, or the explicit ones reproduced through television or cinema, have caused the Society to acquire certain prejudices -both negative and positive- when facing the great chal-lenges of its future.

Science-Fiction was part of the culture of the 20th century. Some of his unreal predictions are already possible, such as the three-dimensional hologram of Princess Leia in Star Wars. Now, in the 21st century, the ambition of this type of art escapes even the most ingenious imaginations. Yet, as we will see below, who knows if in the future they could be palpable and part of our daily routine.

Let us go back to 1917, the year in which the Czech Joseph Capek wrote the Opilec tale in which he already imagined the first automatons (López Pellisa, 2013). Three years later, his brother Karel Capek wrote the Science Fiction play Rossum’s