When I was young and starting out with computers, programming, BBS’ and later the early internet, technology was something that expanded my mind, helped me to research, learn new skills, and meet people and have interesting conversations. Something decentralized that put power into the hands of the little guy who could start his own business venture with his PC or expand his skillset.
Where we are now with AI, the opposite seems to be happening. We are asking AI to do things for us rather than learning how to do things ourselves. We are losing our research skills. Many people are talking to AI’s about their problems instead of other people. And they will take away our jobs and centralize all power into a handful of billionaire sociopaths with robot armies to carry out whatever nefarious deeds they want to do.
I hope we somehow make it through this part of history with some semblance of freedom and autonomy intact, but I’m having a hard time seeing how.
As someone who uses machine translation on a daily basis, I’ve watched it go from being barely usable to as good as human translation for most tasks. It’s really uncommon that I find issues with it any more. And even if there is one issue in 1000 words or whatever, you can just have a human proofread it instead of translating the whole thing, it will reduce your headcount my 90%. But I think for most things, no one calls translators any more, they just go to google translate. Translators now only do realtime voice translation, not documents which used to be most of their work.
These things creep up on you. They aren’t good and you get comfortable that they don’t work that well, and then over time they start working as well or better than humans and suddenly there’s really no reason to employ someone for it.