Re: table transformation

> HI, as a person who has met and worked with people overseas who rekey PDFs
and add metadata and XML tags to text extracted from them (or from Word) to
create XML  I am concerned about the ultimate effects of ChatGPT on the
workers.

You're quite right to be concerned. They are as doomed as the army of
insurance clerks whose job was to produce routine quotations for motor
insurance, or the army of payroll clerks whose job was to calculate people's
weekly pay and count out the notes and coins every week into a little brown
envelope, or the typesetters who would take the journalist's copy every day
and set it in hot metal, or the staff at station ticket offices who used to
take our money and sell us a ticket. Where will it all end? So far, society
has coped with the changes, and it will probably continue to do so, but there
are certainly negative effects: one of them being an increasing gap between
the educated rich and the uneducated poor. History suggests there is no way of
preventing technical advances, and the best we can do is to try and address
their consequences.

The consequence I am personally most concerned about is not the loss of
skilled work, but the loss of personal trust. We're getting to a point where
all the signals we traditionally use to distinguish friend from foe are
becoming unreliable, which means we end up either falling for scams, or
trusting no-one. Deepfake voice emulation is going to cause havoc, as is
intelligently customised spam. Getting back a bit closer to the subject of
scientific literature, the spread of misinformation about vaccination is just
one example of how easily people can become seriously misled in a digital
world. And yet farcically, we still have clients who imagine that a printed
letterhead or a rubber stamp are some kind of evidence of authenticity.

Sorry, Tommie, for going off topic, but you go where the conversation takes
you...

Michael Kay
Saxonica