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It's very, very surprising to me that that person has found a way to say that "everyone loses" with machine translation. If they wanted to look at a foreign we

It's very, very surprising to me that that person has found a way to say that "everyone loses" with machine translation. If they wanted to look at a foreign website 30 years ago, what did they do? Call up a human translator and get them to translate? No, we just didn't read foreign language websites. For me, this is on par with arguing that English to foreign language dictionaries are bad, it's just ridiculous. Sorry if this comes across as too aggressive, I just come across this backlash against technology and labour-saving devices somewhat often, and it really confuses me.

AgentOrange1234 4y ago
There weren’t even web sites 30 years ago, but yes to all of this.
- joefourier 4y ago
  30 years ago was 1992 and the web was already a year old, so there were already a few websites, including some in Hebrew and French (although most were physics-related). Usenet itself is going to be 43 years old next year!
  - AgentOrange1234 4y ago
    Ah, I thought HTML was 94? I could have it wrong.
onion2k 4y ago
Your post isn't aggressive at all. It's fine. If you look at machine translation in isolation you might actually be right. Perhaps we don't really need accurate translation at all, and translation jobs won't be missed, and having more-but-worse translation is a benefit of AI. But my point was more about using translation as an illustration of the impact of AI on an industry. In the case of translation there are maybe 5 or 10 percent of the translation jobs today than there were 20 years ago. Machine translation has decimated the translation industry. People are happy to have bad translations in order to save money. That is a pretty indisputable fact. My point is that this is likely to be the case for everything that you can generate with AI. If people will accept a slow, buggy, shitty app generated with AI because it saves them money then there is every chance that there could be 90% fewer devs in a couple of decades than there are now. It's hard to accept as a dev. I'd wager that if you'd told a translator back in 2002 that a computer will replace them in two decades they'd have had a hard time accepting it too.
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  The difference with software is: the AI doesn’t need to write the software. It is the software. Rather than “write me a calendar app that has a reminders feature” it’s “remind me to pick up the kids at 5:00”
vba616 4y ago
>No, we just didn't read foreign language websites I don't understand. You're just denying that, before machine translation worked well, some people translated their websites into more than one language? Not many, but some did. The complaint is that automatic translation hasn't just added translations for those who couldn't afford knowledgeable people, but replaced some of the good translations with bad ones, at the same time driving people out of that kind of work. I guess it seems at least superficially plausible to me because of the devastation wreaked on journalism by ad-tech. Maybe the economic net benefit correlates to a societal net benefit, but that doesn't mean everybody has to be happy about the losses.
- kaashif 4y ago
  > I don't understand. You're just denying that, before machine translation worked well, some people translated their websites into more than one language? Not many, but some did. No, I'm not. If the website was in a foreign language, I couldn't read it. If it had been translated, it was no longer only a foreign language website. > Maybe the economic net benefit correlates to a societal net benefit, but that doesn't mean everybody has to be happy about the losses. The reason this confuses me is that it seems extremely obvious that there is a massive net benefit. I can actually read foreign news from even the smallest website which never had the resources to translate. I can read foreign forums and subreddits discussing local politics - there's no universe in which anyone would've hired anyone to translate forum posts... It's just patently ridiculous that machine translation might NOT be a net benefit.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    It's just patently ridiculous that machine translation might NOT be a net benefit. Ok. Let's assume that you're right, and apply the same logic to AI writing code: Everyone gets free access to an AI that can write buggy-but-kind-of-working code for an app they can describe in plain English. If someone wants a basic app, for any reason, they just have to go through a series of prompts and they get something deployable out the other side. This democratizes coding, it enables and empowers millions of people, and it means anyone who wants an app of any sort can have it basically for free. Yay! The downside is that the development industry shrinks by 90%. That could be a net benefit for society, and I have no doubt people who want an app right now but can't afford to pay devs would absolutely think it is. I don't think you can assume cheaper access to worse products is necessarily a good thing though. There are downsides, like the consolidation of service provision into the hands of a few companies. For example, if you want translation today and you don't have a ton of money you're pretty much stuck with what Google will give you, with all of Google's biases.

AgentOrange1234 4y ago

There weren’t even web sites 30 years ago, but yes to all of this.

joefourier 4y ago
30 years ago was 1992 and the web was already a year old, so there were already a few websites, including some in Hebrew and French (although most were physics-related). Usenet itself is going to be 43 years old next year!
- AgentOrange1234 4y ago
  Ah, I thought HTML was 94? I could have it wrong.

onion2k 4y ago

Your post isn't aggressive at all. It's fine. If you look at machine translation in isolation you might actually be right. Perhaps we don't really need accurate translation at all, and translation jobs won't be missed, and having more-but-worse translation is a benefit of AI. But my point was more about using translation as an illustration of the impact of AI on an industry. In the case of translation there are maybe 5 or 10 percent of the translation jobs today than there were 20 years ago. Machine translation has decimated the translation industry. People are happy to have bad translations in order to save money. That is a pretty indisputable fact. My point is that this is likely to be the case for everything that you can generate with AI. If people will accept a slow, buggy, shitty app generated with AI because it saves them money then there is every chance that there could be 90% fewer devs in a couple of decades than there are now. It's hard to accept as a dev. I'd wager that if you'd told a translator back in 2002 that a computer will replace them in two decades they'd have had a hard time accepting it too.

flappyeagle 4y ago
The difference with software is: the AI doesn’t need to write the software. It is the software. Rather than “write me a calendar app that has a reminders feature” it’s “remind me to pick up the kids at 5:00”

vba616 4y ago

>No, we just didn't read foreign language websites I don't understand. You're just denying that, before machine translation worked well, some people translated their websites into more than one language? Not many, but some did. The complaint is that automatic translation hasn't just added translations for those who couldn't afford knowledgeable people, but replaced some of the good translations with bad ones, at the same time driving people out of that kind of work. I guess it seems at least superficially plausible to me because of the devastation wreaked on journalism by ad-tech. Maybe the economic net benefit correlates to a societal net benefit, but that doesn't mean everybody has to be happy about the losses.

kaashif 4y ago
> I don't understand. You're just denying that, before machine translation worked well, some people translated their websites into more than one language? Not many, but some did. No, I'm not. If the website was in a foreign language, I couldn't read it. If it had been translated, it was no longer only a foreign language website. > Maybe the economic net benefit correlates to a societal net benefit, but that doesn't mean everybody has to be happy about the losses. The reason this confuses me is that it seems extremely obvious that there is a massive net benefit. I can actually read foreign news from even the smallest website which never had the resources to translate. I can read foreign forums and subreddits discussing local politics - there's no universe in which anyone would've hired anyone to translate forum posts... It's just patently ridiculous that machine translation might NOT be a net benefit.
- onion2k 4y ago
  It's just patently ridiculous that machine translation might NOT be a net benefit. Ok. Let's assume that you're right, and apply the same logic to AI writing code: Everyone gets free access to an AI that can write buggy-but-kind-of-working code for an app they can describe in plain English. If someone wants a basic app, for any reason, they just have to go through a series of prompts and they get something deployable out the other side. This democratizes coding, it enables and empowers millions of people, and it means anyone who wants an app of any sort can have it basically for free. Yay! The downside is that the development industry shrinks by 90%. That could be a net benefit for society, and I have no doubt people who want an app right now but can't afford to pay devs would absolutely think it is. I don't think you can assume cheaper access to worse products is necessarily a good thing though. There are downsides, like the consolidation of service provision into the hands of a few companies. For example, if you want translation today and you don't have a ton of money you're pretty much stuck with what Google will give you, with all of Google's biases.