TEFLpocolypse: Endgame

There's a story -- most likely not accurate -- that the early indigenous people, when they first saw the boats of the Europeans crawling over the horizon, simply couldn't see them. Their brains just didn't register something so far out of their experience and frame of reference.



(Perhaps they were just choosing not to swallow the red pill, eh?)

Now that's probably crap, of course. This article suggests they were too busy surviving to react until the explorers got close enough to deal with, for example.

Most certainly, even if they saw the ships, they had no idea they were the beginning of the end of their civilization.

Now, I think of that whenever I look at my smart phone.



The end of my job, and most jobs, as we know them, is just sitting there in our pockets.

I visited the city of Xi'an last week during a long weekend, to see the Terracotta Warriors. See, the emperor thought he could take his army with him to the other side, in the form of 8000 clay statues, but little did he know their heads would fall off and they'd just end up a tourist attraction.

Xi'an is not a very cosmopolitan place, and few people speak English; but that doesn't mean a damn thing anymore, because their phones do. 

Taxi drivers, hotel employees, restaurant personnel -- they all talked to us with their smart phones. There are apps now that not only instantly translate text, but translate voice to text (and vice versa) and can scan a word and change it to spoken or written Chinese. And not just crude sentences of a few mangled words, either -- our taxi driver managed to bark a few gruff words of Chinese into his phone and have it produce, "Shall we return to the hotel now?" in a beautiful British accent. 

I mean, of course, most jobs will be eliminated in the very near future by software and robots anyway. Porn and masturbation robots will even eliminate the need for the world's oldest profession. In a world where you can buy a Scarlett Johansen robot for $50,000, who needs humans anyway?