This Guardian story on how a new piece of software might be able to replace reporters, or something like that, got me thinking about two things:

If Metafilter weren't on a break, there'd already be a gigantic discussion thread combining the programmers who would speculate on how this would/wouldn't work and then it would turn into a discussion about how robots would do a better job than all those hacks working for newspapers now.

Would this have been treated negatively in an American publication? Would we have focused on the idea of making the journalist obsolete? Or on it's technobooster converse, which would see the potential to make every doofus their own news editor? Methinks the latter, methinks, methinks.