Only Anecdotal

Over the summer, I took on the task of editing a quarterly newsletter for the New England Translators Association. I was honored by the request and have wanted to get more involved, so I started collecting articles that I thought might interest the members. As I was doing this, I received some surprising news at work. My job, and the job of two others in my small office, were being eliminated by the end of summer. I started job hunting, and two trends became quickly evident to me. One, there are many unaccompanied minor children who have ended up in a new country alone. This alone was not news, but I was surprised by the number of recruiters offering opportunities to language professionals and case managers (also preferably bilingual). The jobs paid fairly well, but sounded grueling and required long stays away from home.

The second trend was also nothing new in our brave new world of smart phones and smart televisions and smart cars and smart houses and lives. Artificial Intelligence needs teachers, too, it seems, and recruiters are out all over the place rounding up subject-matter experts, preferably bilingual, to train large language models to sound more normal.

It occurs to me as I write this that I could have just asked my browser to write up something cute for my blog about the new jobs around this, but I didn’t. I hold tight to the talents that bring me pleasure, especially, but also, I would rather not work for $20 per hour in a job that is intended exactly to eliminate people like me.

So many years ago, I remember sitting in high school Latin class listening to my often-off-topic teacher. His ponderings were an enormous part of what made him a great teacher, and one day he was musing about the future. In the early 1980s, he told us that the next revolution, an unimaginable change, he said, would be a cybernetic revolution. We had a little lesson in Greek that day, learning a word that has, indeed, changed everything.

Many things will happen this year. I am sure of this, as we face an election and the steady march into this world where machines seem more and more capable of thinking for us. I wonder sometimes if we have a responsibility to train these machines well and not leave them to the subject matter non-experts who need a job. Would it make a difference? I have tried to understand the technology and the changes coming for years now, but it remains fuzzy to me. I suspect that much as I long for newsprint and vinyl, we may all soon long for the tangible, and for the warmth of humanity to replace the machine-generated mask of pure imagination.