Why AI doesn’t just kill jobs — it creates new ones you never imagined. Here’s proof from the front line
Listen to Steve read this post below…
You Might Not Know This, But I Have a Business-Level Understanding of Mandarin Chinese – Both Spoken and Written.
But so do you.
Yesterday, I spent a couple of hours translating an investment prospectus for Macro3D into Chinese for a group of interested investors from the Middle Kingdom. I trusted AI’s ‘judgement’ with a multi million dollar deal, and it didn’t let me down.
It was even easier than I expected. I simply took some chunks of text from our English document and dropped them into ChatGPT. You can see a sample of one of the translated pages below.
Of course, the risk of using AI for something you don’t fully understand yourself is that you might not know if the output is accurate, whether it has the right nuance, or if it’s just some weird AI hallucination. Taking that into account, I decided to double-check it with another AI. The process went like this: I fed the original English into ChatGPT to get the Chinese translation. Then, I ran the translated Chinese through Gemini’s language agent (Google’s model) and asked it to translate it back into English. I cross-referenced the original English with the back-translated english version to check for meaning and tone.
The good news? It didn’t miss once — it was spot on. Flawless.
Now, the current zeitgeist tells us that AI is about to unleash a job apocalypse. But today’s little project told a different story. I don’t believe jobs are going to evaporate the way some commentators and keyboard prophets are predicting.
Here’s the twist: without this tool, this expert-level translation of an important investment document simply wouldn’t have happened. There’s no way my co-founder and I could have justified hiring a professional translator — not because we don’t value the skill, but because it didn’t make commercial sense. We would’ve just sent the document in English and hoped that one of the interested parties was fluent, or had it translated on their end.
The point is: no one missed out on doing this job. No one lost employment because AI was involved. In fact, it unlocked an entirely new layer of value. A potential investment in Macro3D is now underway — foreign capital flowing into Australia, sparking a multiplier effect that could lead to new jobs in the burgeoning sector of robotic and automated construction.
Tune into the Futuristic Podcast with me and Cam Reilly
Now, I’m not saying translation services won’t be impacted — let’s be honest, it’s one of those skill sets that will largely be replaced by AI. But that’s not a new phenomenon. We’ve seen it before in every industrial wave. We all need to adapt — some more than others. No one should assume immunity. But we also need to remember this fundamental economic truth:
When technology makes something cheaper — or free — it ‘frees up capital that can be invested elsewhere… in areas that demand new human input.
And that’s the job of the near future:
Figuring out what the new, needed, and uniquely human contributions will be.
—
Keep Thinking,
Steve.
** Get me into do an AI keynote at your next event. I’ll use this as my testimonial!