Nobody wants to confront the idea of their own obsolescence. Still, sitting across a desk from Kris Hammond, in his office overlooking the lake shore in Chicago, it is hard not to at least have a sense of the inevitable. Hammond is the co-founder and chief scientist of a company called Narrative Science, which, among other things, has worked out a way of teaching machines how to write journalism. At the moment, the computers' output is limited to basic sports reports and business news. But Hammond is convinced this is only the beginning.

During my commute the other day, I ended up on a dark subway car. The train still had power--the air conditioning was on, the announcements were coming through--but all the lights were dead. I live near an above-ground stop, so at first there was morning sunshine coming in through the windows. But when the train went underground, we were plunged into complete darkness. I found myself suddenly in a sea of floating, ghostly faces, illuminated by the glow of smartphones.

Look closely at what many journalists write about artificial intelligence – from AlphaGo's triumph at the ancient Chinese board game Go to Microsoft's accidentally racist Twitter bot – and you might detect some smugness. Research by Oxford University has predicted that journalism is among the jobs least likely to be replaced by a machine in the near future. And yet, as Columbia University prepares to celebrate 100 years of the Pulitzer prize, intelligent robots will publish financial reports, sports commentaries, clickbait and myriad other articles formerly the preserve of trained journalists. "A machine will win a Pulitzer one day," predicts Kris Hammond from Narrative Science, a company that specialises in "natural language generation". "We can tell the stories hidden in data."

In 2012, a year which feels a lot like the very early years of the era of data, Wired published this article on Narrative Science, an organization based in Chicago that uses Machine Learning algorithms to write news articles. Its founder and CEO, Kris Hammond, is a man whose enthusiasm for algorithmic possibilities is unparalleled. When asked whether an algorithm would win a Pulitzer in the next 20 years he goes further, claiming that it could happen in the next 5 years. Hammond's excitement at what his organization is doing is not unwarranted. But his optimism certainly is. Unless 2017 is a particularly poor year for journalism and literary nonfiction, a Pulitzer for one of Narrative Science's algorithms looks unlikely to say the least.