BOUND TO PLEASE / Will artificial intelligence learn how to take over your job?

Just by typing the letters "A," "r-o-b," "w-r-o," "t-h-i," and "s-e-n" into the text messenger on a mobile phone, the predictive text function helped write that first sentence. What will do so is software such as StatsMonkey, which can automate sports reporting. The software analyzes statistics from a baseball game and "generates natural language text" to come up with phrases such as "Things looked bleak for the Angels when they trailed by two runs in the ninth inning" and even includes quotes from players. This is just one of the many well-researched examples presented by Martin Ford in his scarily intriguing new book, "Rise of the Robots." Ford is not some Luddite scared of technology, though.