How the CIA is using robots developed for journalism to help it understand data

Very interesting slice of the future here – extending the existing software which produces automatic write-ups of sports matches for US news outlets into other fields.

This time, it is intelligence operations:

Narrative Science is somewhat known in journalism circles for its automated sports and finance articles, but in a fascinating profile last year, Steven Levy wrote about how the company “realized that it could produce much more than journalism”:

Indeed, anyone who needed to translate and explain large sets of data could benefit from its services. Requests poured in from people who were buried in spreadsheets and charts. It turned out that those people would pay to convert all that confusing information into a couple of readable paragraphs that hit the key points.

Read the full story about the CIA here.