<
https://geekway.substack.com/p/the-robots-wont-cause-massive-unemployment>
"Until yesterday morning, if you’d asked me to name a US job where total
employment had decreased due to 21st-century automation I might well have said
”translator.” Automated translation among major languages has been “really
good” for years now, as AI researcher and languge app Duolingo cofounder Luis
von Ahn puts it; so good that since about 2016 professional translators have
generally started working from machine-generated 1st drafts instead of blank
screens.
I figured that with eight more years of progress in machine learning and the
advent and spread of generative AI (the transformer architecture of which was
originally developed for translation tasks), professional human translators
would by now be getting scarcer, especially in high-wage America. But they’re
not.
According to a Tuesday story in
Planet Money, both the Bureau of Labor
Statistics and the Census Bureau find that translator employment has grown in
recent years. The BLS also finds that translators get paid almost 20% more than
the median US worker."
Via
What Could Go Right?: Feeling Good Again
https://theprogressnetwork.org/world-is-more-positive/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
