I'm all for technological advancement, and I know AI can be a healthy and good tool that furthers civilization. It can be so good, aiding people with disabilities, like advancing hearing aid tech.
But until tech companies learn some manners, AI will remain tabooed and using it will feel like the equivalent of stabbing someone in the back.
But it might give rise to, or bring back, some old career paths. And this section is about one of the ones I thought about.
So, you know spellcheckers, right? Websites, browser extensions, or built-in into your document software? You know how great they can be. They don't always pick up all the errors but they do clean up your document really well.
Well, at the time of writing, my job includes writing and proofreading, and my hobby that makes me feel better and chases away the stress and depression is writing fiction.
So you can see how spellcheckers would be even more useful to me.
If you're new to the workplace, you may assume that I'm delegating my job as a proofreader and getting free money. But that's not how work works.
As a professional, in any field, you can't just ignore tech advancements for the rest of time and keep doing your work as manually as possible.
Take calculators and supercomputers for example. Should mathematicians and analysts not use them? Instead do all calculations by hand? Yes, that's how it used to work, but then they didn't reach the advancements we have, right? They did advance, don't get me wrong. They built pyramids and calculated the circumference of the earth. But tell me they wouldn't have been grateful to have a calculator to speed up the process, giving them more time to advance further.
Technology's job is to take away the repetition and low-skilled yet time-consuming tasks.
Spellcheckers for a proofreader do that. Then, a proofreader's job is to check what was missed obviously, and look up things and rules that the spellchecker didn't check for, or marked incorrectly. Plus, using the context of the text to proofread accordingly, like ignore spellcheck completely if you're writing in a Pidgin dialect or using informal speech or writing an accent or using new words that aren't in the spellchecker's dictionaries yet.
Like that anecdote about the mechanic, it's about knowing where to tap, or what to look up, more specifically.
The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation
The Sense Of Style By Steven Pinker