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Notes -
I wonder if this is because the labor stats aren't looking at the right thing. It's over for translators, like major streaming services are just slapping ai translations on most new shows.
The stats clinging on are probably mostly in asl interpretation, which doesn't get helped by gpt, and in person translation like legal, social services, and illegal alien resettlement.
Everyone says this as a kind of self-reinforcing meme, but objectively it's not true.
For example, as just one example I'm familiar with, Japanese/Chinese book/game/show translation began booming in the last ten years and has been booming even harder in the last five years even with AI. Ten years it was extraordinarily difficult to find translations of Japanese/Chinese media outside of the most mainstream anime, while nowadays there is an enormous translation-industrial complex that employs many people I'm acquainted with, and that is dedicated to pumping out simultaneous localizations of even extremely niche media into English/Japanese/Chinese, because of massive consumer demand.
I'm certainly not saying translation is a growth field in the age of AI, and it's not something I'd advise anyone to get into in 2026, but the point is how these technologies diffuse into the economy and interact with demand is extraordinarily hard to predict and often times very counter-intuitive.
As another example, someone could have watched the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 and realized that self-driving trucks were a matter of time, but someone else could have started driving a truck in 2004 at the age of 18, have reached 40 in 2026 without meaningful threat from self-driving, and have had a good chance of making it into retirement as well, based on the current pace of self-driving rollout.
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