Recent discussion on SWET-L  about what the future holds for machine translation and the need for humans to do related work turned to Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Anyone familar with the book have any comments on the prospects for human translators as machines evolve?

Also of interest in the discussion was this BBC article from earlier this year and a much earlier article in Wired, Why the future doesn’t need us.