Robots in the newsroom. Yes, you heard me right. In the run-up to this mid-year special issue on robots, we were discussing the many avatars of bots and got to discussing their presence in media organisations. Of course, these are algorithms and not humanoids. So, forget that image of a two-legged robot sitting at a keyboard and typing away.

One of the more interesting stories I was told was about Quakebot, the programme designed by journalist and programmer Ken Schwencke. He was with the Los Angeles Times when Quakebot was born, and is now editor of ProPublica’s news apps team.

At 6:25am on March 17, 2014, Schwencke was rudely awakened by a tremblor. He hurried to his laptop and found that Quakebot had already written a short piece about the quake. Three minutes is what Quakebot took to do this, Schwencke said later. He hit publish and the story was up, making latimes.com the first news outlet to report the earthquake. Schwencke had designed Quakebot in such a way that every time the US Geological Survey put out an alert about a quake, the bot would extract the information, fill it into a pre-written template and send it to the editors for clearance. Three minutes. It is impossible for any human reporter to meet that deadline.

It is another matter that the barebones squib or filler written by Quakebot was revised and added to multiple times—by humans—during the course of the day. The story that would have appeared on latimes.com that evening or in the Los Angeles Times the next day, would have had much more in terms of information and human interest details. The final article would have been Journalism With A Human Touch, which is THE WEEK’s tagline.

Anyway, newsroom bots are currently restricted to data-heavy areas like business and sports. How have left-handed batsmen held up against X bowler on Y ground? An algorithm would be able to mine legacy data and spit out the relevant facts. So also, when it comes to business data. Or, the weather. How hot has this summer been in comparison with all other summers? Putting that data into context, cooking it your style, garnishing it, plating it…all that remain human functions. Hence the rise of the cobots, the collaborative robots, which Senior Correspondent Sneha Bhura discusses in this cover story.

Sneha also discusses an upcoming role that robots might soon fill—companionship. With the aged population growing in numbers and with children being scattered to the ends of the earth, these humanoids might have to step in. In fact, there was a Malayalam movie on the theme, Android Kunjappan Version 5.25, starring Suraj Venjaramoodu, Soubin Shahir and Kendy Zirdo. I think Zirdo might have been the first Arunachali actor in Mollywood. With the OTT boom, there are no regional actors anymore, I feel.

Anyway, I digress. Companionship. Will I trade my assistants Rajesh and Murugan for a bot? No chance. I would cherish the human variants over an Android Rajesh or Microsoft Murugan. Why would I always want to hear predictable things? Sometimes it is good to hear things you do not like to hear—both in life, and on the news.