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  • “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” says Stephen Hawking.

In a recent Bleader post of mine touting a new travel magazine published by the Smithsonian, editor Victoria Pope made a confession. At an earlier point in her career she’d reported from Germany for the Wall Street Journal and, “I was a disaster at earnings reports, and though I tried I never got any good at it.”

I’d never heard of Narrative Science until a colleague pointed out the Economist coverage to me, but it’s a formidable company. Cofounder Kris Hammond, its chief technical officer, teaches computer science and journalism at Northwestern and earlier founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Chicago. We’re swimming in data, but people don’t like numbers, he explained to the Atlantic in 2012. Unless those numbers can be turned into narratives, he said, they do us little good. People need stories.

This ingenious analogy is comforting largely because it’s clever—and cleverness is an attribute that doesn’t come up much when AI’s talents are being touted. Cleverness might turn out to be the human race’s ace in the hole. But now consider the Atlantic story.

“If a story can be written by a machine from data, it’s going to be. It’s really just a matter of time at this point,” he said. “But there are so many stories to be told that are not data-driven. That’s what journalists should focus on, right?”

And we will, we’ll have to, because even our simplest moments are awash in data that machines will never quantify—the way it feels to take a breath, a step, the way the sun cuts through the trees. How, then, could any machine begin to understand the ways we love and hunger and hurt? The net contributions of science and art, history and philosophy, can’t parse the full complexity of a human instant, let alone a life. For as long as this is true, we’ll still have a role in writing.

So I sympathize with Stephen Hawking’s fear of what he sees coming down the road. Of course, Hawking’s judgment is skewed. He never had to write an earnings report.