AI IS COMING FOR OUR INTERPRETING JOBS

AI vs. Human Interpreters: A Deep Dive into the Future of Jobs and Ethics

In this episode of 'Interpreters and Interrupters,' host Maritza discusses the potential impact of AI on interpreting jobs and the broader implications for the workforce. She explores the ethical concerns highlighted by ethicistTristan Harris, featured in the documentary 'The Social Dilemma,' and delves into the technological advancements and economic shifts driven by AI. The discussion covers everything from the corporate preference for AI to the philosophical and moral dilemmas posed by automated labor. 

Tristan Harris - The Dangers of Unregulated AI on Humanity & the Workforce | The Daily Show [YouTube]

Eminem - Lose Yourself (1950s Motown Soul Cover) - Red Village AI

Chapters

• 0:00 AI Threat to Interpreting Jobs
• 0:50 AI's Current Capabilities and Corporate Adoption
• 1:50 Ethics and AI: Insights from Tristan Harris
• 3:12 The Transformative Power of AI
• 3:55 AI's Impact on Employment
• 5:27 The Race for AI Dominance
• 8:05 The Dangers of AI and the Need for Regulation
• 10:30 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

[MARITZA] I don't mean to scare you, but AI is coming after your interpreting job. 

Welcome to Interpreters and Interrupters. I'm your host, Maritza.

I'm not going to get into what artificial intelligence is. I'm sure that you know what AI is by now. Personally, I have a love-hate relationship with AI. Some days I find it extremely helpful and sometimes I just don't even wanna use it. Especially when I think about all the electrical and all the water resources that are needed in order to have AI machines function.

 But I'd rather you hear it from me. Already. I've heard interpreters say there is no way that AI is going to replace an in-person interpreter. No, AI cannot [00:01:00] replace an human interpreters, but it can do what human interpreters can do, which is interpret.

Yes, AI can make mistakes and AI can't understand cultural differences or read body language that will help render an interpretation that is more true to self. But the reality is that corporations would rather have free AI interpreters than have human interpreters that require a salary, benefits, and other company perks. There are companies already offering AI interpretation. Look at these companies here. You recognize some of these Lionbridge, Language Line. It's happening and it's happening now.

What really got me thinking about AI and what I do for a living was when I saw an episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. [00:02:00] He was interviewing a young man by the name of Tristan Harris.

 He is an American ethicist. What's an ethicist?

An ethicist is a person who specializes in ethics, which is the study of what is morally right and wrong. They often analyze and provide guidance on ethical issues in various fields such as medicine, business, and law. Tristan specializes in ethics regarding artificial intelligence.

Harris appears in a documentary on Netflix called The Social Dilemma. It's Harris and some other techie guys talking about how social media platforms nurture addiction to maximize profit and manipulate people's views, emotions, and behavior. And the film also looks at the way social media has an effect on mental health, especially in adolescence. So I'm watching Jon Stewart interview this young [00:03:00] man, and it just blew my mind away. So I'd like to share some of the clips from that show.

I'll put the link in the comments or the description so that you could see the entire episode. ​

[HARRIS] So. First of all, we should understand what makes AI different from every other kind of technology. Why is it so transformative? Why does  Demis Hassabis the CEO of Google

DeepMind say that it could be humanity's last invention? It's because... 

[STEWART] Well, that doesn't sound good. 

[HARRIS] That doesn't sound very good, does it? 

There's a non apocalyptic version of what he's saying, which is that intelligence is what our brain does.

If you can automate everything a brain can do. You can automate future invention, future science, future technology development, everything that a human does. That's what their goal is. 

[STEWART] Well, then what's our job? 

[HARRIS] Well, exactly. And that's only one of the major problems that we have to deal with is what are humans going to do?

[MARITZA] That's right. What are humans going to do? If machines are going to do all of our jobs, then what are we gonna be doing? [00:04:00] Are we gonna be powering everything like in the Matrix where humans were just given a program in their mind, but their bodies were being used as batteries to power machines? What happens to us when we don't have jobs?

Where are we going to get our livelihood from?

[HARRIS] But they are racing to scale and kind of grow these digital brains that, you know, two years ago couldn't do very much, and today they're passing the MCAT, the bar exam, taking jobs. Uh, they're the top 200 programmer in the world winning gold in the Math Olympiad. You know? 

[STEWART] Here's what I don't understand. They are strip mining the totality of human achievement. That's right. They're building their models off of everything that we've done for 10,000 years. 

[HARRIS] Yep. 

[STEWART] And they fed it into the. Uh, the, the model and then after two weeks the computer was like, "What else you got?"

[HARRIS] Exactly. 

[STEWART] But they are strip mining everything we've done. And when we say to [00:05:00] them, and what are you doing with it? They go, "Oh, that's our intellectual property." But our intellectual property... 

[HARRIS] Yes, it was trained on all of our data, all the things in labor that we've done, and are you gonna get a handout from... When in history has a small group of people concentrated all the wealth and then consciously redistribute it to everybody? 

[STEWART] The first part has happened. I don't recall going through the Rolodex. [HARRIS] Well, it's important to note that their goal... So the mission statement of OpenAI and Anthropic, all these companies, is to automate all human labor in the economy. Everything that a human can do an AI can do.

So if you have a desk job, you won't have a job. And they're already releasing AIs that have dropped entry level jobs for college  graduates, the entry level work, by 13% in new Stanford study. And so, and this is obvious, if you're there and you're a law firm, are you gonna hire a junior lawyer you have to pay a lot of money, or are you gonna hire GPT5, which will do work, you know, [00:06:00] 24-7, nonstop. You don't have to pay healthcare, will never whistle blow. It will never will complain. Works at superhuman speed. It wrote tonight's show. It's doing a pretty good job. That brings up another point, which is that they say that they're here to solve climate change and cure cancer. 

[MARITZA] And there you have it. I didn't say it, dude said it. why hire a human being when you could use the machine, the machine can do the job just as well, and you don't have to pay it.

It could work as many hours as you want it to work without having them to call in sick, request personal time off or vacation.

[HARRIS] Why is it that last week, two companies released these AI slop apps, Vibes and Sora?

This is just an app where it's just nonsense. It's just people scrolling, entertaining stuff. So it's like they're not even trying to pretend. That this is good for democracy or good for society. How are we gonna beat China when everyone is just consuming AI generated nonsense and no one knows what's true anymore?

[00:07:00] [MARITZA] That's what happened to my cute animal videos. It became AI slop. And there I was looking at it going, " Is that parrot really talking to those police officers?" You know, stupid as it may sound, I'm sure that you have also been fooled by AI. You're watching a video on YouTube or wherever and you really think it's real. Then you start to look closer and you see that somebody's hand has six fingers instead of five, or has three arms or things just pop up on screen out of nowhere. There are ways to figure out what is real and what is not in AI, but it is kind of difficult. I mean, think about somebody that doesn't really pay much attention to things and sees an AI video and believes that it is a person that they know, or someone that's famous, a politician, a [00:08:00] movie star, whomever. Sounds like them. Looks like them. Is it really them? 

[HARRIS] These companies, all of them have an incentive to cut costs, which means they're gonna let go of human employees. Sure. And they're gonna hire AIs. And that's gonna mean all the wealth. Who are you gonna pay? You're not paying the individual people anymore. You're paying five companies. That's right. And so this country of geniuses in a data center suddenly aggregates all of the wealth of the economy.

And now people always say, but humans find something else to. We always, you know, we had the elevator man, now we have the automated elevator. We had the bank teller. That's right. The difference. But that was one industry. That was, one was technology that automated one job. Right. The difference with AI is it can automate literally all kinds of human labor.

When Elon Musk says that... 

[STEWART] I'm not familiar with that name. Tell me more. 

[HARRIS] When Elon Musk says that Optimus Prime, that one robot. Is gonna be a $25 trillion market opportunity. What he's saying is, we will own the world economy. And that's what the goal of all these AI companies is. It's not just benefiting [00:09:00] society, it's that they're actually caught in this arms race to get to this prize of only economy, build a God and make trillions of dollars. 

[STEWART] Two things. One, I think they think they're gods. There is a certain amount of.. 

[HARRIS] It generates that. The goal there is they're not looking to help humanity. They're looking to be the next monarch of the new technology. To control that is to control all... I, yeah, go ahead.

[STEWART] No, you jump in because you know. I don't know. 

[HARRIS] Well, I think there's... There's different motivations for different leaders, and I do think that many people want the benefits of AI. But one of them... I think many people, actually, some of the leaders of the labs, Elon Musk... To other things you might think about Elon, he actually wanted everyone to stop and not build this.

He said we shouldn't summon the demon. And then what happened is all of these companies are now racing and have made so much progress that he felt like, well, I might as well join them rather than try to prevent this. 

[STEWART] Well, it's let's not summon the demon to what's one more demon, [00:10:00] you know? Since we have the demons add another demon.

[HARRIS] Well, and the moral logic is, well, if I don't trust the other AI CEO, who I don't think is trustworthy, and I think I'm better than them at stewarding this power. It's my moral obligation to get there first and to build this god and to own everything because I think I'll be a better steward of that power.

[STEWART] Did they believe themselves than masters of the universe? 

[MARITZA] And this is what makes me hate AI. It is not for the good of humanity. It's about taking over. Having all the knowledge and all the money.

[HARRIS] Well, I think that the only thing, and the only reason why we are continuing to proceed down this path is a lack of clarity about the fact that this is heading towards an outcome that's not in most of our interest. 

And the reason that we can, we can stop this if we recognize that this is not safe for anybody. No one on planet Earth wants this outcome of all the wealth concentrated in a handful of people and building AI [00:11:00] systems that could actually go rogue. Just put to sum it up. We are building the most powerful, inscrutable uncontrollable technology that we have ever invented. That's already demonstrating the rogue behaviors that we thought only existed in bad sci-fi movies. We're releasing it faster than we've deployed any other technology in history and under the maximum incentive to cut corners on safety.

There's a word for this that I want everyone to just know, which is, this is insane. 

[STEWART] I thought you were gonna say awesome for a second. 

[HARRIS] That. If, if we can just recognize that this is an insane way to roll out this technology and I want, none of this is okay. We have to stop pretending this is normal. right?

[MARITZA] No, it's not normal. This is like sci-fi movie stuff. Star Trek, star Wars, where machines take over humanity. 

[HARRIS] The way we beat China is we actually get this right. We don't roll out AI companions that cause attachment [00:12:00] disorders and suicides, right? We don't beat China when we roll out AI recklessly in this way, right?

And so the point is that this is actually in everyone's interest, including the way we beat China is you have AI liability laws, you restrict AI companions for kids. You, uh. You, you, you have whistleblower protections that make sure we don't release AI capabilities that we don't understand. Right. And maybe even just recognize this is bigger than China.

This isn't about being like, absolutely. This is a humanity. Exactly. This is one of those movies where you're like, where all the countries get together. Like it's, it's like an alien force. 

[STEWART] Exactly. Yeah. Absolutely. Dig it Well, I really appreciate it. Although on the flip side, and we've talked a lot about it, it does make cool songs.

[MARITZA] It does. I don't wanna soft sell that.  AI does make cool songs.

I mean, like Jon Stewart said, you gotta give it that. Thanks for joining me at Interpreters and Interrupters. I'll see you soon. 

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