It's not hard to imagine a system in the near future where robots have replaced human journalists and write articles using algorithms. In fact, this transition has already begun, writes Tim Dunlop.

Newspoll recently sacked more than 100 staff members and replaced them with robots.

Now, instead of using humans to phone people and ask them who they are voting for, the job will be done using autodialers and recorded messages.

As a union representative of the sacked workers said in an interview with industry site, Mumbrella:

We have 130 good union jobs, we have excellent pay, excellent conditions and these jobs are now going to be done by computers, it's a real tragedy.

This is a situation that is being replicated across industries. White collar jobs that were once thought to be immune to the threat of automation are now vulnerable - everything from accounting, to legal analysis, to, yes, even journalism.

To the extent that what Newspoll does is quantitative - involving the gathering and crunching of numbers - it is easy to see why it would lend itself to automation.

Of course, those who use the polling data - journalists in particular - will tell you that it is the interpretation that matters and that aspect of polling is safe from being replaced by robots.

But that simply isn't true.

More and more news articles are being generated by software designed to spin a story out of various inputs.

Martin Ford, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and the author of The Rise of the Robots, spoke on a recent NPR podcast about advances in journalism software:

Essentially (the programs look) at the raw data ... and it translates that into a real narrative. It's quite sophisticated. It doesn't simply take numbers and fill in the blanks in a formulaic report. It has the ability to actually analyse the data and figure out what things are important, what things are most interesting, and then it can actually weave that into a very compelling narrative.

He points out that this software is "generating thousands and thousands of stories ... and that they appear on a number of websites and in the news media," including the financial news outlet, Forbes.

Such software, he notes, works best with "those areas that you might consider to be a bit more formulaic, for example sports reporting and also financial reporting", so it is easy to see why the reporting of political polling - and not just the polling itself - might be vulnerable.

Indeed, the ongoing criticism of polling journalism is that it is formulaic, that it reduces politics to a sporting contest, and that the interpretation of the figures is often shoddy if not outright misleading.

More generally, journalism is incredibly vulnerable to automation because the business model that has traditionally supported it - advertising - is not generating anything like the revenue it did previously. So media managers are constantly looking to cut costs.

But surely, I hear you say, robots can't do the sort of in-depth, investigative reporting that constitutes great journalism?

Maybe not, but take the big political story of the week, the Cabinet leak that was reported by Peter Hartcher.

On one level you could argue that it came about by a good journo cultivating sources over years and that this was the pay off.

There's probably some truth in that, but the fact is, journalists will tell you that the leakers often come to them because they are looking to achieve a particular outcome of their own. Journalists are just the happy recipients of spleen venting and score settling.

Under such circumstances you don't need a journalist, just a dropbox of some sort. And indeed, that's pretty much what Wikileaks is: a place where anyone can upload leaked material to their heart's content.

Still, even Wikileaks discovered that they needed to work with media outlets in order to vet and publicise the material they were gathering - for example, the footage of US soldiers "collaterally damaging" civilians during an airstrike in Baghdad.

But the real value-add here wasn't the journalism per se; it was the reach of the media outlets, their ability to publicise the story.

The journalists may have been necessary to shape and fact-check the stories, but it actually isn't that hard to imagine a system in the near future where leakers leak to a website, the story is "legalled" by legal software (which already exists), written by narrative software (which already exists) and is then published. Never touched by human hands.

If that sounds too unlikely, then perhaps the easiest sort of "journalism" to replicate with software is the bombastic, first-person commentary so beloved by tabloids.

Just as there are already programs that will generate postmodern gobbledygook, it would be pretty easy to come up with software that churns out the sort of shock-jock nonsense that is justified in the name of "getting a reaction" or "generating clicks". (We could call it the Bolt Bot.)

The thing is, automated journalism is going to become more common - the economics are just too compelling for it not to happen.

So the question to ask is, what effect will it have on our democracy? What will it mean if more and more of our "news" is being written by journalism programs?

Well, let's look at it.

Reducing citizenship to neat demographic categories that turn people into just another input for some sort of democratic algorithm is a risky game for a nation to play. And yet, increasingly, this is what politics is.

As party memberships dwindle and politicians become part of an insulated political class, their contact with the electorate is more and more reduced to reading polling data and feedback from focus groups or, worse still, reading that data as it is mediated by various news outlets.

We mightn't like this, but would we even notice if the mediation was being done by bots instead of journalists?

On a more positive note, maybe by freeing up human intellect from producing the sort of rote stories that overpopulate mainstream outlets, robo-journalism will release people and resources for more important journalistic undertakings.

This rationale is already being advanced. As Philana Patterson, an assistant editor at the Associated Press - a company that uses bots to write stories about company earnings reports - recently said:

One of the things we really wanted reporters to be able to do was when earnings came out to not have to focus on the initial numbers. That's the goal, to write smarter pieces and more interesting stories.

(This article makes a similar point.)

It's a nice thought, but it is flawed in the way a lot of talk about data mining is flawed: it fails to account for the way the process itself affects the parameters of what is being analysed. To put it another way, "gigo" applies: garbage in, garbage out.

But isn't that the problem now, with humans in charge?

Political reporting has already been turned into a sporting contest where score is kept by fortnightly polls of limited efficacy. Information is force-fed into pre-existing narratives and churned out like sausage.

That is to say, such reporting is already reduced to a formula that makes producing stories easier and more efficient: that is, cheaper. (And it was on this track a long time before the 24/7 news cycle took effect.)

Seen in this way, the automation of journalism is nothing more than a logical extension of what is already happening, and journalists have - perhaps through no fault of their own - entered into the conditions of their own extinction.

Tim Dunlop is the author of The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience. He writes regularly for The Drum and a number of other publications. You can follow him on Twitter.