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January 16, 2004
Bank of Computers Writing Bush State of Union Speech Aides Plan to Blame Computers if Gaffes Pop Up This Year In a historic departure from past practices by American presidents, the State of the Union address that President Bush will deliver to Congress on January 20 is being written entirely by a computer. The president's team of 45 speechwriters may tweak the computer-written address in the final hours, an Administration official said. "But what the President conveys to Congress and to the public will largely be a result of what the computer decides he should say," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The decision to let the computer do the thinking was arrived at slowly within the Administration and not without debate, which apparently became acrimonious on several occasions. But what carried the day for the computer in the end was fears of a gaffe in the 2004 address like the one about Iraq's importing of uranium from Africa for use in making nuclear weapons that popped up in Bush's 2003 address. Bush's uranium remark -- the now infamous "16 words" -- has been widely discredited. The furor over the remark and its possible role in pushing the United States to invade Iraq to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein set off a speech writer witch hunt of sorts as Administration officials sought a politically acceptable place to pin the blame. "We just don't need that kind of spectacle again in an election year," the Administration official said. Left unsaid, but clearly hinted at, is the ease with which the computer can be blamed should any controversy over Bush's 2004 speech arise. Amid great secrecy, a team of artificial intelligence experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Stanford University in California and the Casper, Wyoming High School computer club was assembled in Washington last fall. They set about writing the computer code necessary to harness supercomputers at several academic centers and put them to work on Federal government computer databases, including those used to identify and find terrorists, write Social Security checks and track illegal shipments of cocaine from Columbia destined for the United States. The supercomputers also used the artificial intelligence programs to parse billions of Internet Web pages, terabytes of e-mail gleaned from personal computers throughout the country by the National Security Agency and three decades of the dialog from PBS' "Masterpiece Theater" programs. Members of the Casper High School computer club, working with staff members from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, were assigned the task of writing computer code that instructed the supercomputers to read all the editorials in The New York Times and The Washington Post since January 20, 2001 and come up with intellectual constructs exactly opposite to those in the editorials. That information was also fed into the mix of data used to write the final draft of the speech. "There's doubtlessly going to be some jockeying between the speech writers and the computer in the final hours before the speech," the Administration official conceded. "The writers are a competitive bunch. But the text of the computer-written speech will be kept under wraps until the last minute just to keep the tinkering to a minimum." An analyst at right-leaning Conservative Thought, a Washington think tank, praised the brilliance of using artificial intelligence technology to digest Times and Post editorials. "If you were to base government policy on nothing other than doing the opposite of what those editorial writers say, you wouldn't go wrong," he said. Copyright William Stockton & Smithtown Creek Productions |
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