Let's be honest here. It's coming. We all knew this was coming. I remember the 80's when all the factory jobs vanished. Jobs do disappear. It does happen. And, it's going to happen again. I'm pretty sure that AI will take my job. The race is now to see if I can retire before then. Twenty years ago when Google Translate hit the streets, every ESL teacher knew that the clock started on the end of ESL teaching as a career.
And I have no doubt that ten to fifteen years from now, the ESL industry in Asia will collapse. Why bother spending billions of tax dollars to pay foreign workers to teach English in your schools when an app on the phone will do real time conversation translation? And that's absolutely coming. It's a question of when.