Sarah O’Connor We Are Not Writing Machines – can dignity at work survive technological change? | | Technology books

MeIt has never been easier to land and have a good career. But it feels like it’s getting bigger. In June, the number of jobs in the UK fell to a five-year low; headlines warn of AI job shocks. What will the future of work look like – and who or what will change its tone? In her new book, Sarah O’Connor goes in search of answers to the current collision of artificial intelligence, automation, and human services.

This conflict between humans and machines – and the fight to protect good jobs despite pressure to increase production – is not new. No more worries about the health risks of repetitive factory work or the loss of creativity and independence due to machines. O’Connor has been a reporter for the Financial Times for almost twenty years, and even We Are Not Machines he looks to the future, many AI threats bring dignity and safety of workers seem like a reenactment of past wars. The book takes its title from the signs that Swedish miners carried in 1969 when they protested against their employers’ new methods of monitoring their performance. “We are not machines“, their signs say: “We are not machines.”

That may be true, but we mostly to share Our work is a machine. O’Connor visits the EMA4 Amazon Warehouse in Sutton Coldfield where robots and humans work together, “picking” and “burning” products. Warehouses like EMA4 are supported by remote workers in Costa Rica and India, whose job it is to monitor video feeds of Amazon’s shelves, checking the accuracy of AI cameras that track where products are placed. He works for nine hours, watching more than 8,000 videos a week: a new online queue has been created. Is this real progress?

Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of management consulting and an assistant manager of productivity improvement, is prominent in this book. Although Taylor died more than a century ago, some form of “Taylorism” – the idea that design processes can be divided into different categories, dividing each process into a number of measurable processes – remains in many workplaces today. The real issue, as O’Connor sees it, is not the new technology but the ideas that accompany it – how “seemingly neutral technologies can smuggle powerful ideas into the market through the back door”. In the age of automation and AI, some of those ideas have to do with the mutual contribution of humans and machines: “If you see the work of humans as one optimized element within a complex system that is planned and controlled from above,” O’Connor writes, “then you can see the opportunities offered by new technology in it.”

There are other considerations regarding the true purpose of work. As O’Connor puts it: “If machine work is a little worse than human work, but much cheaper and faster, that would be a trade-off that employers, clients, and customers want to make.” (If you’ve ever tried to assemble furniture with useless AI written instructions or been caught by an online customer service machine, you’ve experienced the consequences of this tradeoff.)

But workers and consumers are powerless. The most promising stories in the book show workers taking matters into their own hands: the Writers Guild of America who are fighting to establish a timeline and how AI can be used in literature; Dutch care workers who develop their own systems to organize individual patient care without time constraints.

We are not Machines he concludes with a warning: “The goal may be to make a machine in our image,” writes O’Connor. “But what I fear is that – perhaps without realizing it – we are creating ourselves.” Good news? These were not static questions, and the future of work is still something we have the power to shape.