Human translators could soon be joining the rising list of people who are losing their careers to AI, according to the CEO of start up Unbabel.
Vasco Pedro made the statement on Wednesday at Web Summit in Lisbon, and said that advancements in his company’s technology meant that previous iterations of the platform that required human interaction could be replaced entirely.
Pedro isn’t the first AI CEO to make the claim that AI is likely to replace jobs and entire industries, with some companies already committing to use AI in place of people.
Human Translators to be Replaced in Three Years
At Web Summit in Lisbon to discuss his company’s latest product, Unbabel CEO Vasco Pedro stated that Widn.AI, built on it’s proprietary Large Language Model (LLM) Tower, would exclude the need for human translators within the next three years.
Pedro stated “it’s hard for me to see right now how three years from now, you will need humans to be translating anything”. The companies previous platforms have all needed an editor at the final stage to check the end result, but now even that role could be shortly eliminated, according to the CEO.
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A knock on effect of the lack of need for humans in the process is that the cost of translating will dip considerably, with the traditional salary considerations for translators no longer an issue. Pedro stated that while ‘per word’ revenue in the industry will “drastically reduce”, the volume of material being translated would increase, making the new model sustainable.
Unbabel isn’t the first translation company to lean into AI at the expense of humans. Duolingo announced in January this year that it would be offboarding 10% of its contractor workforce and replacing with AI translation solutions.
Is AI Really Coming for Your Job?
The announcement from Unbabel isn’t the first one that is likely to have workers rushing to polish up their resumes in fear of losing their livelihood. In fact it’s a message that many AI CEOs have relayed to us constantly over the past couple of years, during the current AI boom.
Perhaps one of the most vocal of these is Sam Altman, CEO of AI platform of the moment, OpenAI’s ChatGPT. So confident is he in his platform’s ability to usurp us, that Altman has regularly made statements that millions of people will lose their roles to AI. In 2023, in an interview with The Atlantic, Altman said that “Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.”
Don’t despair though, as Altman believes that when these jobs are naturally swallowed up by AI, we’ll all find “new and much better jobs”.
Companies that Have Replaced Workers with AI
For all the scaremongering and bluster around AI stealing jobs, we haven’t seen too much impact of it to date. In fact it seems that many companies are instead choosing to provide AI tools to help make employees’ lives easier, rather than replace them outright.
However, there are certainly some stand out cases where humans have been ditched in favor of AI. Here at Tech.co, we’ve been tracking these as they happen, with the likes of IBM, MSN and Klarna all replacing human roles with AI.
In some instances, while AI has replaced roles, there have been no layoffs, as companies commit to upskill those affected workers and move them to different positions. This is the step that Ikea took when it introduced an AI bot named Billie to answer customer service queries. Call center workers have received training to become interior design advisors, instead.
Of course, replacing humans with AI can backfire. MSN’s AI platform has got its owners into hot water for posting inappropriate polls next to sensitive news stories and also described a recently deceased NBA basketball player Brandon Hunter as ‘useless at 42’. British delivery firm paused its AI customer bot after customers found it could easily be coaxed into swearing and criticizing the very company it worked for.
