Another day has broken! You wake up once more without hardly realising it, gently nudged back into consciousness by your electro-pulsating wristwatches and sunrise lamp, all calibrated to perfection based on years of harvested data. You walk into the kitchen and with the usual familiarity, you turn the dial on your breakfast dispenser and watch as your app-composed mix of grains and seeds dispense down into a bowl.

There’s something about the colours that catch your eye and make you think of Stacey, the girl who used to sell granola at the local farmer’s market. She was so friendly, and always coming up with fun new flavours. The market has been closed for years now, ever since everyone made the switch to intelligent portioning. You wonder briefly whatever happened to Stacey but shrug off the thought as you switch on your tailored AI news feed.

The quasi-humanoid voice begins reading out its sequence of generated stories tailored to your interests. Although it mimics the style and cadence of the old news readers, it still sounds somewhat hollow and you find yourself tuning out. You did catch the first story though, something about serious disruptions after the new self-driving software update finally launched. It seems cars began communicating with the supermarket check-outs and both networks had to be shut down when they started inventing a new language. That old chestnut again!

After exactly five minutes, the update ends. No music, no conversation. You miss the old local station – which still exists, of course, but it hasn’t quite been the same since they replaced their DJs with AI models to cut costs. You make a joke about the headline story to your home assistant – something about him talking to the supermarket checkouts and maybe blagging you a discount. But he doesn’t understand and starts listing the addresses of nearby supermarkets instead. “Stop, stop!” you screech. So much for the new banter module you installed last month!

It’s time to focus now, anyway. You activate your HoloScreen and log into the email app. Tonnes of emails have come in overnight from the Mexico office. As per company policy, you have your AI assistant synthesise the content to save time on going through them all. You then ask it to synthesise a string of smart replies based on a keyword analysis and the company’s communications policy. It’s been a while since you last read the policy document, you think to yourself, but then you remember the last draft was generated by AI in code anyway. It’s really just meant for the machines nowadays.

Once the drafts have been generated, you are tempted to hit send without checking them over first. That would mean clearing your whole inbox in under five minutes, giving your productivity metrics a much needed boost. But you glance over the text out of habit and notice a reference that doesn’t look quite right. Something about riding around on top of a chicken?

You think for a second and then you remember – isn’t that an idiom in Spanish? Montar un pollo – it means to make a big fuss. It used to pop up all the time in the early days of auto-translated emails, you remember. You learned so many Spanish phrases and sayings back then out of sheer necessity, the machine translation software just didn’t know how to handle them and so you had no choice but to learn what they meant.

You take a closer look at the text and realise it concerns the new product launch next week. That’s Marta’s project, you think to yourself, and you remember fondly the email exchanges you used to have. You used to help her with her English and she told you in unnecessarily details about the latest exploits of her many cats. Sometimes she even attached photos! It would be easiest just to pick up the phone and untangle this mess the old fashioned way, you think to yourself. But that would be a breach of the company’s AI efficient-use policy …

You bring up her contact card and hover the cursor over the dial button. You hesitate for a minute. If you get caught up in conversation, that could really harm your productivity score for the morning, and you can’t afford another black mark against your name. The government is still in gridlock over the new universal basic income bill, and the labour market is in free fall. This job is all you have.

A warning flashes up on screen – your inbox should be cleared by now, and a new email has just come in. You close down Marta’s contact tab and hit send on the AI-generated drafts. It’s going to be a long day ahead.

 

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The above is our imagining of a plausible future scenario, told with what we in our native Danish would refer to as a ‘sparkle in the eye’ – or a touch of tongue-in-cheek humour, as a human translator might put it.

Of course, nobody knows with any certainty what the future will look like, and at the same time, there is no doubt that artificial intelligence holds the potential to vastly improve our lives. It can liberate us from mundane tasks and help us see patterns and trends that elude our cognitive capabilities. From curing diseases and streamlining processes, there is a lot of potential in what AI can offer.

But right now, we find ourselves in a transitional phase where we are trying to figure out what we should entrust AI to do and what we shouldn’t. We see that AI can mimic a lot of human tasks, including some creative ones, and we are trying to decide where to draw the line. The future we present above is one in which that line ends up drawn just a little too far out from where it should be.

At this point, you might be thinking that some of the examples seem far-fetched, but did you know that AI radio DJs already exist today? The quip about machine-translated idioms is taken directly from our own experience, and ChatGPT has already been adopted as a tool for drafting emails. In fact, we could have gone even further – in the last few years, generative machines have had books published, produced award-wining art and even made Homer Simpson into a post-modern recording artist. We are seeing a re-creativity explosion at the minute, as we stand on the precipice of a murky new age.

Could you imagine a future in which all of this becomes the norm? Imagine sitting down to watch a drama series tailored to your interests, scripted by a bot and acted out by AI versions of your favourite actors? A television show that only you have seen, that you can’t share or talk about with anyone else?

Right now, new developments are stirring up conversation and debate, with different views taking shape on both sides. The worry is that they will also edge out human producers – a concern not just because it means job losses and poorer working conditions in the short term, but because it means a world of re-creativity – old human input recycled by machines, without any spark or wit. A world without friendly voices on the radio, banter with colleagues and yes, even those small interactions with local producers, artists and business owners at the farmer’s market.

Translation is on the front line of some of these changes, representing what many perceive will be the first domino to fall. It has often been said that the best translations are the ones you don’t notice – the ones that seamlessly convey language without drawing attention to themselves. Perhaps it is for that reason we might think that machines are fit for the task. But all language is human, and translators form part of the wide and varied patchwork of human voices that inject our world with colour and warmth. Without them, we risk sleepwalking into a future that looks something like the one above.

That is why we created FairLoc. That is why we should let the humans do the talking! To learn more, click here.