Such apples-and-oranges comparisons are not reassuring.
I keep actively looking for why this concern shouldn't be concerning and coming up empty.
There are still some 'editor' positions, however they don't pay very well and I'd imagine they won't be around long either.
People have been predicting speech recognition replacing human secretaries since the 1950s, starting with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_workshop
You don’t have to get rid of all jobs in a field for it to have major impacts.
Try in ChatGPT asking it to translate some passage of relative complexity into idiomatic Thai. Start a new chat. Ask it to translate the Thai, pasted in, into idiomatic English. This was always a way to test how bad exactly Google translate is. It’s essentially flawless with ChatGPT.
I showed my brother in law, who is Thai in Thailand and who works for an English speaking multinational. It’s revolutionized his job. He struggled to be understood, and struggled with Google translate to make something understandable. Now he’s able to conduct his business without friction.
More regular "business" translation will probably be displaced by AI tools.
In general the default should flip from it can't do x to it can do it until ypu tried it and verfied it.
Also, be sure to retest with every new release.
I had some modest experience with this and “thrived” doesn’t line up with how the translators I worked with described it even a decade ago – they loved our project because we valued quality, whereas most of the work they were seeing was rapidly declining wages because Google Translate was good enough to get businesses to decide they didn’t need to pay much for humans.
I’m pretty sure you’re right that this is the death knell for translation as a career unless it’s in combination with some other scholarly skill.
Fully automatic transcription by AI is a very, very hard problem, based on my experience of many of the jobs I got*. The automatic transcription makes the work 10X easier now though by applying a first pass that gets you 90% of the way and then humans like me come in and fix it all up.
* One hard example was a motorcross race commentary where it was necessary to know which riders the commentators were referring to based on their amusing and sarcastic comments, the nicknames of the riders, and deal with the fact the audio was 99% revving engines.
We've seen this a lot of different ways to varying extents. There aren't robots making fast food. But there are demand prediction and just in time scheduling systems that allow fast food businesses to run shifts with fewer employees. Nothing "replaced" those workers, but they don't work there anymore, the service is worse, the remaining workers are overworked and lack consistency in their scheduling.
Examples like this are all over most industries over the last 10-15 years. We'll see more of it and in novel ways. The AI won't replace your job, you just won't have a job anymore because of the AI. Should you care about the difference? Depends on how much stock you own vs how much you need to work, I think.
As white collar professionals we're insulated from a lot of this or at least think we are. It's going to suck shit for most everyone else though.
How tho? Ai is coming precisely for white collar and knowledge jobs.
Matter of time
> people will need to shift to these other jobs that AI can't do
America will not help them do so. Carnage will ensue.
Blue collar jobs are generally safe, especially skilled ones, but lots of entry and mid-level “white collar” work is at risk.
That leaves "just" removing white collar jobs, which is estimated at 43% of US jobs!!
https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/the-professional-and-te... (It seemingly includes nurses and teachers, which may need to be removed)
E.g. Grocery store cashiers haven't been replaced by humanoid robots, but they have been significantly offset by computers and scales and by making the customer do the manual steps of scanning and bagging via self-checkout.
And why do think that there will be enough of these other jobs for everybody?
The funny thing is that when automation caused a large loss of blue-collar jobs, the answer was "just retrain for white-collar jobs". Now that it looks like there's a real threat to white-collar jobs, the answer is "just retrain for blue-collar jobs?"
Something is very wrong here.
No, they won't unless there's no other option. If AI works out as proponents are dreaming it will, there will be another option.
Also, if there's a large amount of unemployment, how will people spend more money?
That is not how economics works...
Unless they can expand by spending capital instead. Workers are an expensive long term liability. This is why in every industry that has been able to automate at a cost 'around' human labor or less has. You don't harvest wheat with 100 people with scythes, we invest huge amounts in to capital intensive combines that can do the work of a few hundred people. At the same time, some fragile fruits have not been well automated yet, and we use unskilled low paid labor to do work like that.
What you are not doing is answering the question of "What will happen if we can automate a significant fraction of white collar labor"? Blue collar work moved to the service/information industries for higher pay. If that market shrinks, there is not any other high paying skill based market for these people to move into that I know about.
It is highly possible we could see general wage suppression. Plenty of jobs, very rich companies enriched by the control of AI, not plenty of pay. Now just contemplate the economic problems that's going to cause.
In reality, the productivity improvements will reduce overall costs, and either the field gets easier to break into, reducing wages, or incumbents are able to squeeze out other workers and keep more profits for themselves.
There's billions in tech investments flowing into medicine, construction, and hospitality from people hoping to make worker more efficient and aiming to capture a fraction of the wages from those efficiency gains.
There's a very real possibility that jobs get replaced by things like, The Home Depot App, which can diagnose an issue, find order the necessary parts from the store, and walk people through all the steps to fix the problem. Again, it doesn't have to completely eliminate jobs, shift how money flows around the market.
IMHO, the revolution won't be televised. It will be like self-service machines at the grocery, restaurants, hotels, etc. We just slowly get used to using kiosks and apps to do more and more things for ourselves.
ie one software with unlimited scope that's constantly reiterating new versions of itself, self improving in near real time.
The software company that creates this will be the last software company, and probably the last unicorn so to speak.
That's why there's an arms race now, because whoever gets AGI first could be good or bad and everybody thinks they can do it better and safer, but let's fire our ethics team because they slow us down...
The team who's first will reach such growth, nobody will ever be able to catch them.
Disclaimer: I'm working on my own ai platform too
Look at huge tech companies, how did FB become a 75k employee company that runs a social media site with ads on it?
I do fear for people who are a one to one replacement in low margin industries like fast food.
I'm not sure that's true. When the industrial revolution displaced factory workers making stuff by hand, they were a new middle class that had moved off subsistence farms to work in the city.
This is not true in the US. In the past, it was lower and middle class jobs that disappeared. Now the threat is to lower, middle, and upper-class jobs.
The VP of Widgets is going to push an AI Initiative that will save money and increase revenue for the company, and as a result, they will get a nice bonus and a promotion of the Chief Widget Officer. Then maybe segue that into a "consultancy" where they overcharge other companies to advise them to do the same.