The writing is on the wall for language teachers. Within twenty years wearable voice translators (rudimentary at present) will be as common as mobile phones. Only a few eggheads will bother to learn foreign languages. Why spend years in a dingy classroom struggling with the present perfect if you can effortlessly talk to foreigners right away?

Your interlocutor will speak in Mandarin/Swahili/Welsh, etc and a little voice in your ear will say, “I really feel life is, like, we’re here, right, for some kind of, you know, like it’s meant, know what I’m saying?” On second thoughts, perhaps the new technology will not be such a good idea.

Nevertheless, when it arrives, language schools will go bankrupt. Teachers will be unemployed. Books on humanistic teaching and the lexical approach will be shoved into library basements alongside dusty tomes on phrenology and Tractarianism.

Naturally you think I am joking. The people least likely to recognize the obsolescence of a profession are its members. The first bulky and expensive pocket calculators caused derision among slide rule manufacturers. Candlestick-makers said the electric light bulb would never catch on and semaphorists were sceptical about wireless telegraphy. Avenators, bowyers, burnemen, chaloners, daunsels, dudders, fletchers, fullers, garcifers, latouners, nedders, orramen, pirn-winders, puddlers, safernmen, sifkers, spurriers, sword-cutters and whitesmiths pooh-poohed the jeremiahs who suggested new technology might somehow impinge on their livelihoods.

The International Association of Peruke-Makers, for instance, had their own journal, Peruke-Making Professional, and conferences in coastal towns, at which bores would stress the importance of fitting the wig to the “whole wearer”. Nobody ever wondered if perukes might one day go out of fashion.

Instead of languages, schools will have to teach the few remaining skills that computers cannot appropriate. Like sex. “OK, class, now get together in pairs.” A few teachers may be lucky enough to find jobs as museum exhibits. Visitors will peer into a classroom full of students gossiping in their mother tongues, while outside the teacher is having a cigarette and telling the DOS, “It’s good for them to be left alone sometimes. It stops the class becoming too teacher-centred.”

Personally I am resigned to a penniless and nostalgic old age. Youngsters will ask, “Hey, granddad, did people actually learn foreign languages in those days?” And I will ruminate for a moment, then say, “Well, sort of.”

The author is a Director of Studies, but will shortly be replaced by a Sony PlayStation.