When it comes to employment, AI is a twin-pronged attack. Most obviously, it's resulting in job losses - but its less widely reported but more insidious effect is that of de-skilling.
Take the field of translation, for example. While demand for pure translation jobs seems to be declining, there is still work for translators. However, as noted in this Guardian article by Philip Oltermann, this is "post-editing": the checks that need to be conducted after machine translation processes have been run on the text. Increasingly, translators are being reduced to simply tidying up after the AI has finished.
Needless to say, such jobs are poorly paid compared to pure translation, with companies assuming that AI has done the bulk of the work and that humans are only needed to add a bit of spit and polish. The reality, though, is that these jobs are vital to avoid embarrassing errors. They are also as taxing as translating from scratch, or indeed even more so (as the AI output needs to be checked against the original), and therefore often more time consuming. The inevitable result is demoralised professionals and a devalued skill.
Those quoted in the Guardian article insist that a trained translator's finely honed skills and sensitivity/feel for language are irreplaceable. One of them, Marieke Heimburger, has the last word: "I'm not really scared of AI, because I know it cannot do what I can do. What I am afraid of is the people who think that AI can do my job." As someone who works in a closely related field (copy-editing/proofreading), I can only agree.
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