Will the future of twitter be an interaction with the soft side of a scantron form?

Writers and poets, those people who are find paychecks in the act of inventing worlds and the people in them, are being hired by the bot makers.

There are obvious implications for advertising: how is this different from a social media expert being called in to manage the responses from a corporate twitter account? In some ways, it’s almost the same, but with a more elaborate script and a robot.

For years, writers have been working in advertising and corporate communication. They build campaigns and transform companies from a collection of products into a brand with something called “voice.” (It’s telling that the rulebook for this “voice” is usually called a “brand bible.” The ascendance of organization into transhuman entity does require some suspension of disbelief and heavenly skill with metaphor.)

So, now, there’s this new job: the poet programmer. Instead of telling a single static story in half a minute, they are given as much time as they can handle to craft a storyline, and to actively pull in the public. Whether that storyline sells a product or simply drives towards some other call-to-action, it’ll be like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” on your phone.

The rise of this technology is evident in a wave of new jobs at the intersection of human and artificial intelligence. By 2025, 12.7 million new U.S. jobs will involve building robots or automation software; by 2019, more than one-third of the workforce will work side by side with such technologies, according to Forrester Data.

Chatbots are the automation of the social media intern’s job. It’s also the decentralization of the social media team’s work product, the execution of “brand voice.” With automation and decentralization, the amount of money it takes to complete a huge job goes down, but the amount of expertise needed to manage the work goes up.

More below.

[sources]