IGetting there and finding a good job has never been easier. But it feels like it’s getting harder. In June, the number of job vacancies in the UK fell to a five-year low; Headlines warn of impending AI-employment shock. What might the future of work look like – and who or what will shape its terms? In her new book, Sarah O’Connor looks for answers in the modern collision of artificial intelligence, automation, and human labor.
This conflict between man and machine – and the fight to secure decent working conditions even as pressure to maximize production increases – is nothing new. Nor are there concerns about the health risks of repeated factory work or the loss of creative craftsmanship and independent judgment in the wake of mechanization. O’Connor has been a reporter at the Financial Times For almost two decades, and although we are not machines Looking ahead, many of the threats AI poses to workers’ dignity and safety look like reenactments of old battles. The book’s title is taken from the strikes carried out by Swedish miners in 1969 when they protested their employers’ new methods of monitoring their production. “it’s a mask“, their signs read: “We are not machines.”
This may be true, but we fast share Our work with machines. O’Connor visited the EMA4 Amazon warehouse in Sutton Coldfield where robots and humans work side-by-side, “picking” and “storing” items. Warehouses like EMA4 are supported by remote workers in Costa Rica and India, whose job it is to monitor video feeds of Amazon shelves, auditing the accuracy of AI camera systems that track where items are stored. They work nine-hour shifts, screening up to 8,000 videos a week: an entirely new online production line has been created. Is this really progress?
Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of management consulting and patron saint of maximizing productivity, figures prominently in this book. Although Taylor died more than a century ago, some form of “Taylorism” – the idea that production workflows can be broken down into separate components, subdividing any process into a series of measurable systems – is still present in most workplaces today. The real issue, as O’Connor believes, is not necessarily the new technology itself, but the assumptions associated with it – the way in which “seemingly neutral technological devices can smuggle powerful ideas into the market through the back door”. In the age of automation and AI, some of those ideas relate to the interchangeability of human and machine contributions: “If you see human labor as an element to be optimized within a complex system that is planned and controlled from above,” O’Connor writes, “then you are likely to see the possibilities offered by new technology in the same light.”
Still other notions relate to the purpose of the work. As O’Connor says: “If a machine’s work is slightly worse than a human’s, but much cheaper and faster, that may be a tradeoff that some employers, clients and customers are willing to make.” (If you’ve ever tried to assemble a piece of furniture with meaningless AI-written instructions or got stuck in an online customer service chatbot maze, you’ve experienced the effects of this tradeoff firsthand.)
But workers and consumers are not powerless. The most promising stories in the book show workers taking things into their own hands: screenwriters from the Writers Guild of America who strike to set terms for when and how AI can be used in scripts; Dutch care workers who set up their own practice so that they can care for individual patients without strict time constraints.
we are not machines Concluding with caution: “The goal may be to create machines in our image,” O’Connor writes. “But I fear that – perhaps without even noticing – we make ourselves like them.” Good news? These are not settled questions yet, and the future of work is still something we have the power to shape.
