AI won't take your job, might shrink your wages, European Central Bank reckons
In the US, however, folks are ready and willing to bin you for a bot
I am a translator. Some decades ago the language industry introduced MT - some kind of precursor of LLM. The prices of translation jobs didn't change, and translators didn't lose their work entirely. But gradually we were offered more and more MTPE (euphemism for fixing the robot's shit) jobs, for a lower rate. Many older colleagues stayed with the few remaining translation jobs, young people starting out became "MTPE editors". These days there are a few translation jobs, many MTPE jobs, and more and more jobs in "AI output rating" - and the new generation will be working as an "AI linguistic assistant" or other such barbarity for even less money.
The tech isn't necessarily bad in itself, but what we have to wake up to is that tech is used to pay each generation after us a little less. We have to resist this and demand fair pay for fair work always - no matter if they want to call it 'translation', 'AI output review' or 'ertdfg sfdgs' - it has a price, and this price has to respect our dignity and enable a healthy life for us language workers and all other workers.
Yeah at that point they will likely push us into a situation where violence with capital is inevitable. I’m not super in agreement with Marx but he had some points here
The best part is, the MTPE workers’ output is 100% going to get fed back into the algorithms, so it’s only a matter of time before the average error rate of the models is good enough that there’s no real reason to pay anyone to look at it.
Not quite, yes and no. It will be ever so slightly off, and the slightly off gets fed back, and language will change. It is already happening since CAT tools introduced segmentation - which means texts were segmented, and thus translated, at sentence level. Where a human translator in front of an unaltered text would have joined some sentences and separated others in the translated text, one tends to stick to the segmentation when working in a CAT tool, and MT- and CAT-translated German sounds almost, but not quite, like human German - remember that beverage machine making tea in the Hitchhiker's Guide? Only we got used to drinking the stuff and reading the texts, what can we do.
And now you have the added feature of MT flavoured translated texts. I for my part really enjoy handmade things these days, fuck AI. I thought AI generated images were funny at first, then understood the computation needs involved, the intellectual property stolen and put to work for corporations, the implications for many digital workers ... it's just more awful than fun honestly and should just fuck off back into the arseholes of the thieving scammers who invented it.
Yeah that's pretty consistent with my expectations. A lot of work will transition into fixing the robots mistakes. So we'd be ceding the interesting, more creatively challenging aspects of our jobs to AIs and turning into data janitors. And that would only last as long as we'd be necessary. They'd hammer out the details making that janitor work eventually disappear.
I do design and illustration and it'd kind of be like telling me "Well we don't need you to illustrate this stuff anymore, but Midjourney still draws shitty hands with too many fingers. So your job now is to fix those hands." That is not what I came here to do and that does not provide the fulfillment I seek from a line of work. And following that analogy, Midjourney will eventually make flawless hands and I'd be out of a job.
Fortunately right now AI cannot hit a specific design/illustration brief to the consistent standards my projects require, nor iterate on a project based on specific and vague client feedback. So I still have work for now, but I see the writing on the wall. I'm always surprised other people don't see that writing too.
This whole thing is going to make an insane chasm of the wealth equality divide we already have.
I am literally fixing punctuation all day that AI is too stupid to pick up. But it translates whole paragraphs most beautifully. I spend most of my working day in some state of dissociation, with an occasional laugh as I watch what I thought was civilization crumble before my eyes - as always, my work software wanted an update before starting a new project, and as ever more often, didn't work after the update. Nobody gives a shit about quality anymore and I guess we're all on drugs or suffer the consequences of long Covid, or both.
Sounds to me like you need a union...
We used to and still have translators' associations, but most of them are stuck in the past. I was proving my skills as a translator by sitting at a desk and handwriting my translation while looking up stuff in physical dictionaries. They probably imagine that we are sitting in an office waiting for clients to walk in and hand us sheets of paper. It's still like this for a few of us, but the vast majority works as typing monkeys part of huge international teams and churns out translations by the meter, and can't afford neither the overpriced exam fees nor the inflated membership fees of organizations who do very little to support the positions of online translators.
So yes, we need a union. But I think it should be international, and best include all digital workers. We are the burger flippers of the digital world and deserve a living wage.
Now, as to AI, I would say the problem is that it's wasteful computation-wise, and that's why I'd rather not have it. I very much value reading texts by actual people, and look at images drawn by actual people and I am willing to pay for that. I want to use hand-knitted garments, hand-woven baskets and rugs, and not have sad people sit in factories 12 hours a day just so I can afford cheap plastic gadgets instead. So the other part of this would be to refuse consuming the cheap imitation of reality they offer after stealing everyone's works. Go treat yourself to the best and most beautiful, done by someone with passion and love for their work. Don't consume trash.
The problem in the case of translators, other digital workers, and unions, however is not really about AI versus brain, machine versus hand. It's about an economic system that forces us to work all day so we can survive. If you have to flip burgers, translate, dig potatos, play the violin 8 hours a day 5 days a week to survive, that's too much. Stop. Demand better.
Yes, they are being paid less. Technology is supposed to free us from mundane tasks and make things cheaper. However, neither one of these occurs because of greed and poor management. So in reality if technology is paying us less, it should also be making things cheaper for us. There is clearly a discrepancy and we should demand for lower prices or higher wages, or both as a compromise. The compromise cannot be lower wages and higher prices, that is economically destructive and fuels greed and class wars.
fair pay for fair work
Sure but what's fair? As you described, the work did change considerably. Translating from scratch is much more work and also much harder than fixing a mostly ok output. It would not be fair to pay both jobs the same amount since the latter can be done by people with less expertise/education.
Eventually, AI output won't need any human editing at all. What then? Resisting change driven by technology is understandable from the individual perspective but it has always been doomed to fail. You know that "computer" used to be a job title?
If 10 farmers can make enough to feed 100 people, and new tech comes out that makes it possible for 5 farmers to make enough to feed 100 people, the ideal scenario is that now all 10 farmers should only have to work half as much. What usually ends up happening is that half the farmers are laid off so the boss at the top can pocket the extra money.
This is how we end up with enough resources to feed, clothe and house everyone but still have people living in poverty. Because the system is no longer designed to provide for people, it's meant to make profit for capitalists. It makes technological progress a negative instead of the positive of should be.
It's logical in a capitalistic sense. Yet it's arguable if that's how it's supposed to be. With all these industrialization, automation, now LLMs, we end up working even more to survive. If not for unions, progressives counteracting it, it could be even worse. Isn't it a regression instead of a progress? Why can't they, at least, start to work less with the same pay so we all end up here somewhen? Isn't that what everyone wants in the future?
Why exactly correcting the text after an AI requires less experience? Main engineer isn't paid less than his subordinates because they don't plan every wall socket themselves, it's an opposite, their experience and competence lets them lead the project and ensure it's up to stantards. They put their personal responsibility for the work their team put together.
I'm not a native English speaker and one of the reasons I started to learn it was because my local tranlations sucked ass. In the media, in books. Sometimes I could see the remains of a mistranslated english idiom that a human translator just didn't recognize. And that's just entertainment, and a bored person who dgaf. AI is just like that. It can't care, it doesn't dig into context, it doesn't intentionally choose what to write, it can't proofread itself. Imagine trusting more important cases like world diplomacy to someone who is just aproximately right, a workbook to someone who pick terminology at random and constantly changes it, a loveletter to an automated SEO optimizer. It can help you grasp the basics of what is said, that's all.
While professional translation is the Craft. And long before the first computer, different prominent authors competed with each other with their own translations of classic and well-known texts, these all got studied and compared ad nauseum, because it's an open question how to do it better. Academics constantly argue if old names for things still fit them, they can start a feud over a slight difference in their definitions you can't smell without 30 years in a field. And instead of mentioning the Bible that had exiles and bloodsheds started over these two, I'd put there our hated TikTok that makes billions of users by making their language of images so effective it's intoxicating. Thus I insist that language fucking matters.
And although in the beginning of my rant I stated I found many mistakes in translations, these helped me understand how much it takes to decode something right. How it's easy to fail it. To appreciate how much effort and soul goes into that, even if it's just correcting.
Your dismissal of their value could be a good trolling tho, if only it was. But it seems your way of seeing that subject may be too popular in masses and obviously profitable to the moneymakers. So perceive that not as a personal reply, but just me letting a steam off for once.
Technological progress is okay if it is
And AI fails for both.
You won't lose your job, you'll just become more of a peasant.
Unacceptable.
The conclusions about the EU job market don't necessarily translate to the US, the researchers caution, noting that their results contrast with previous findings from American researchers.
Research on the effect of AI on jobs in the US has indicated that generative AI could cause 2.4 million job losses by 2030. Large tech players like IBM have also cited AI as a reason to lay off thousands of people whose jobs could be replaced by software.
Now you can work two jobs!
For the salary of one!
They will still work you for everything your worth, they're just paying less for your labor.
People whose jobs can be taken by AI need to learn a trade.
As someone who's worked a trade for 20 years, please consider the incredible damage to your body it will do. I now have a torn rotator cuff and arthritis in my knees at 41. This is a warning.
THAT is the shit that the robots are supposed to do. Not art and literature.
Both you and @Outtatime@sh.itjust.works have a point, and miss it by a bit. It's not the point that a job that could be done by a robot is automatically useless, or that working in a trade is damaging.
There's only room for so many tradespeople though. What is everyone else gonna do?
Probably different jobs. We seem to always come up with more stuff to do than we get with productivity improvements. Also with population declines we are seeing impending continued labor shortages. And there's a big need for tradespeople generally due to not enough people going into it for decades.
I keep thinking eventually we'll get to a post scarcity society a la Star Trek and either need a different economic system or we will continue to slide into dystopia and risk revolution, but that also seems further off as I see how slowly the various tech actually improves, mixed with plenty of issues making society unstable happening now. So we might well get dystopia before we lose "all" jobs to automation.
It's worth pointing out humanity has been worried about automation since at least the 1700s and yet even with all the tech advances we still have much higher average and median standards of living over that time.
People whose jobs can be taken by AI means every human. ALL OF US. It's just a question of how soon. Some jobs will still need humans for several decades, others will not.
What we all collectively need to do is acknowledge that we are winning. This is the endgame of civilization, and our victory condition is 100% unemployment, because no one should be required to work.
But we need to acknowledge that tying a person's means of living to a 'productive job' is no longer viable, and people need to live even without doing something 'productive'.
They should learn how to sabotage AI
Someone just watched the latest South Park episode.
And what would happen to trades wages if everyone and their mother switches to trades?
why
