Toiling in the AI mines

From 2012 to 2024 I worked full-time as a translator. At first I worked in the offices of a translation company, but then I worked at home as a freelancer. I mostly worked for my old company, and I picked up some other clients over the years as well. It was a great job, but sometimes I missed the stability of working in an office, like getting a steady paycheque, or access to various employee benefits like extra health insurance. In the back of my mind I also always wondered what if they just didn't feel like sending me work anymore? As a freelancer there would be nothing I could do about it. And, basically, that's what happened. The company where I used to work was bought out by another, bigger company, and they stopped sending me projects. At the same time, the use of AI in the translation industry was noticeably increasing. Even around 2015, just after I started working as a freelancer, I sometimes realized that companies were using machine translation and asking me to pro...