In 1968 Newspaper Publisher Predicted Robot Editors

In a speech Silha gave in Paris on November 14, 1968 at an international conference for newspaper publishers, Otto A. Silha, publisher of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune newspapers, outlined a very practical application that is being used today: the robot editor.

How the robot editor works

“The Research Center has developed a program so that the computer reads a story, places a numerical value upon each word in the story and through mathematical formulas determine what is most important in the story and then regenerates the story into the length that it was instructed to do,” Silha said in the speech...