It sucks.
I used to get paid to do OCR on tax forms. I used n gram models, BERT,etc and it took weeks to get the forms right. Now you can do it in seconds with an api.
I wouldn’t say the profession got destroyed. I just work with different tools now. Instead of running ngrams, I’m testing different apis or embedding models.
The old job doesn’t exist anymore, in many ways I am the classic example of losing your job to AI-but I wouldn’t say it destroyed the profession. People just use different tools today to get intelligence from PDFs.
“The particularity of this profession to me is that it’s like it was 2 years ago, and it’s a skill that’s handed down from dev to dev. You go around with the most expert, most experienced BERTitori, and you watch and listen to them, and slowly they start to give you the keyboard. You try with them next to you, piano piano, and gradually, you begin to do more on your own,” explained Stocchi. “It’s a big responsibility, you have to be really capable of doing it, you can’t damage the forms.”
some professions spawn from viable hobbies and some hobbies spawn from unviable professions.
I assume the people doing that work might have been lighting lamps in the past.
In the same vein, you doing OCR and now doing other work is not a profession change. You're still a computer scientist doing computer engineering work just on a different problem set.
Lamp lighter to cheese tapper is a profession change. A lamp lighter with bad hearing or attention to detail is not a problem per se. Tapping cheese to see if its ripe (and all the other skills that come with cheese making) will potentially be different enough.
Now the problem comes in, when lamp lighter is supposed to start doing OCR engineering work. Unless the lamp lighter was horribly over qualified, most lamp lighters will not be able to do OCR engineering or any computer scientist style engineering work at all.
Professions do get destroyed all the time. Hopefully while a new profession is born that has similar enough skill level requirements as the previous ones, just in different form. Like a lamp lighter might do well in an Amazon warehouse but not as an AWS software engineer.
It's somewhat still held by the same people that somewhat-traditionally did the job. In some places, it used to be job of the night watch constable to light the kerosene lamps. Police now days just report a broken traffic light.
Our tendency to 'progress' doesn't have to be the case, we all could collectively decide to hold ourselves here.
Also, I don't think that all our technology has always been good for us either. But we are blind to the downsides mostly.
Engineering, the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.