In a recent BBC report of an interview with Google (Alphabet) boss Sundar Pichai, we see Pichai repeating the nonsense spewed by numerous AI tech bros in attempts to allay fears of AI disruption.
Pichai says that AI will also affect work as we know it, calling it “the most profound technology” humankind had worked on. Well, perhaps that part of his comments is correct.
“We will have to work through societal disruptions,” he said, adding that it would also “create new opportunities”.
One person’s manageable disruption is another’s total disastrous loss of earning power.
There are people who have been successful in a number of specific careers who will not be offered or be able to take those “new opportunities.” Many are already being deprived of work and income, by being replaced by AI. Opportunities will be provided to others, perhaps, but certain careers will simply disappear; translation is one of them. Change is coming much too fast for some groups to keep up. The notion that translation will continue as a career is clearly delusional.
“It will evolve and transition certain jobs, and people will need to adapt,” he said. Those who do adapt to AI “will do better”.
Transition? Adapt? What do translators transition to and how do they adapt? By accepting post-editing work at one-fifth the word rate (and certainly not anywhere near a compensating five-fold increase in throughput)? And that doesn’t even address the issue of mind-numbing post-editing work. Most translators will not be able to survive by adapting to AI or even adopting AI themselves, because they have been habitualized by their clients to working only for a client demographic one tier above them on the food chain, and that client demographic is currently using AI to replace them. Freelancers have arguably allowed themselves to be isolated from translation consumers that have not yet adopted AI. AI will be of no avail without clients that are not using AI, and that includes acting as the “human in the loop,” the snake oil sold by the major translation brokers that control most of the translation market.
“It doesn’t matter whether you want to be a teacher [or] a doctor. All those professions will be around, but the people who will do well in each of those professions are people who learn how to use these tools.”
This could very well be true for some professions. As noted above, however, freelance translating is not one of them, as is already being demonstrated to be the case, with large numbers of translators trapped into non-translation functions that pay extremely poorly, if they even have that left as their clients replace them with AI.
The outlook is bleak. More and more translators are coming to realize that, but numerous translation organizations appear to hang onto the delusion that this storm can be ridden out; it cannot. When it passes, it will leave a barren wasteland in its path, with very few translators left standing.
