How safe is your job from automation?

[Lang Spoon]

Britain, saved from automated robot hell by voluntarily sending itself back to 1932. Rees Mogg was sent back in time to save us just like John Connor sent back Arnie in the first shit Terminator. Him and Govey are our only hope against Skynet.

[Patrick Thistle]

just like John Connor sent back Arnie in the first shit Terminator. .

T2 is "the first shit Terminator"? What the actual fuck is wrong with you?

[Lang Spoon]

I’m trying to get banned, between this and my anti Mad Max reboot screeds. It’s not shit at all, but Ed Not Norton (Furlong, says IMDb) is unbearable. As is Arnie in the climax. The Scouring of LA, with Linda Hamilton and her twin sister holding onto the chain link though, fantastic scene.

[Lang Spoon]

The Foster Wallace harangue against Terminator 2 in “Consider the Lobster” is very funny, even if he went too far with at least 50% of the hate.

[Giggler]

Very, given that I don't have one - so I'll be seeing a lot of you in this particular boat over a variety of different timespans.

[Patrick Thistle]

Not seen the Mad Max reboot, Lang, so I'll reserve judgement.

I doubt my job will be fully automated unless the emails could read and answer themselves. Which would be great tbh.

[Sam]

Don't think looking at football then writing articles of variable quality (but mostly ones I'm happy with) is going to automated ever, really, but the amount of it I've actually got means I'm diversifying away from it, little by little. In particular, towards proofreading and translation, two fields which are definitely automation-proof. Yep, I reckon I'm safe there.

[Sam]

* to BE automated.

What a post in which to mistype something.

[Snake Plissken]

I'm hoping that I can retire from telling the machines what to do before they can figure it out for themselves.

[JVL]

I'm working as a translator and at the moment, there is plenty of work available, due to the gradual decrease in numbers of people learning German at school and university. Companies and agencies are finding it harder to get translators for German -> English, which means that prices are pretty stable. The situation is not critical (as for, say, translation from German -> Norwegian, due to a near complete lack of German language training in that country) but the number of translators leaving the profession/retiring is not matched by the same number of skilled resources becoming available. In the long term, that means prices will rise (yay!) but companies may decide that they'd rather invest in automation for a lot of their texts, instead of employing translators to do the job.

Machine translation has been around for a long time and is slowly improving. I recently worked on a big project that had run all the texts through an MT engine before sending them out, so the job was half post-editing and half translation. What took longer? The post-editing of course. In many cases, that meant trying to make sense of what the engine thought the source text meant and then wasting time amending it, before giving up and overwriting the whole segment with my translation.

MT/automated translation can deal effectively with simple, short, repetitive sentences or phrases. Trying to make it deal with differences in word order, endings, cases, genders etc. is a lot more complicated than its proponents would have you believe. But of course you can get the gist of a text by running it through Google Translate (and did I read last week that Google are working on an in-ear translator, an idea like the HHGTTG babel fish?) and as more and more texts are fed into these translation systems, the better they will get. That said, I don't think human translators will ever disappear as some stuff cannot be done by machines - but the day-to-day work for translators will involved more post-editing too.

[ad hoc]

Not just working on. They're out now. (I think they come on the market in November actually but they're done)

[Snake Plissken]

Most CAPTCHAs these days are humans training the AIs through things they can't recognise.

https://xkcd.com/1897/

[Wouter D]

Machine translation has been around for a long time and is slowly improving.

You're not wrong about that, except that the "slowly" might drop out of that sentence soon. They're throwing Deep Learning at it now.

[jdsx]

I work in classical music..... Judging by this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technol...es-opera-debut I'm safe for a bit yet

[Sam]

Those in-ear Google translator things are, perhaps unsurprisingly, something a much smaller enterprise was already having a go at. Good luck to him, especially if his product really is better as he seems to believe (not that he'd say anything else of course).

[Patrick Thistle]

* to BE automated.

What a post in which to mistype something.

Or maybe you just wanted to showcase your mad proofreading skillz