"The infiltration of algorithms into everyday life has brought us to a place where metrics tend to rule. This is true for education, medicine, finance, retailing, employment, and the creative arts. There are websites that will analyze new songs to determine if they have the right stuff to be hits, the right stuff being the kinds of riffs and bridges found in previous hit songs.
Amazon, which collects information on what readers do with the electronic books they buy — what they highlight and bookmark, if they finish the book, and if not, where they bail out — not only knows what readers like, but what they don't, at a nearly cellular level. This is likely to matter as the company expands its business as a publisher. (Amazon already found that its book recommendation algorithm was more likely than the company's human editors to convert a suggestion into a sale, so it eliminated the humans.)
Meanwhile, a company called Narrative Science has an algorithm that produces articles for newspapers and websites by wrapping current events into journalistic tropes
— with no pesky unions, benefits, or sick days required. Call me old-fashioned, but in each case, idiosyncrasy, experimentation, innovation, and thoughtfulness — the very stuff that makes us human — is lost. A culture that values only what has succeeded before, where the first rule of success is that there must be something to be 'measured' and counted, is not a culture that will sustain alternatives to market-driven 'creativity.' "
--Sue Halpern, "Are We Puppets in a Wired World?", The New York Review of Books 50th Anniversary Issue, November 7, 2013
