It\u2019s never been easy to land and keep a decent job. But it feels like it\u2019s getting harder. In June, the number of job vacancies in the UK fell to a five-year low; headlines warn of a looming AI-employment shock. What might the future of work look like \u2013 and who or what will shape its terms? In her new book, Sarah O\u2019Connor goes looking for answers in the modern collision of artificial intelligence, automation, and human labour.<\/p>\n
This clash between human and machine \u2013 and the fight to secure decent working conditions even as the pressure to maximise production mounts \u2013 is nothing new. Neither are concerns about the health risks of repetitive factory work or the loss of creative craftsmanship and independent judgment in the wake of mechanisation. O\u2019Connor has been a reporter at the Financial Times for nearly two decades, and although We Are Not Machines looks to the future, many of the threats AI poses to workers\u2019 dignity and safety look a lot like reconfigurations of old battles. The book takes its title from the signs striking Swedish miners carried in 1969 as they protested their employers\u2019 new methods of monitoring their output. \u201cVi \u00e4r ej maskiner\u201d, their signs read: \u201cWe are not machines.\u201d<\/p>\n
double quotation markThe most hopeful stories in the book show workers taking things into their own hands<\/p>\n
That may be true, but we increasingly share our work with machines. O\u2019Connor visits the EMA4 Amazon Warehouse in Sutton Coldfield where robots and humans labour side by side, \u201cpicking\u201d and \u201cstowing\u201d items. Warehouses like EMA4 are supported by remote workers in Costa Rica and India, whose jobs are to monitor video feeds of Amazon shelves, auditing the accuracy of the AI camera systems that track where items are placed. They work nine-hour shifts, screening up to\u00a08,000 videos a week: an entirely new online production line has been created. Is this really progress?<\/p>\n
Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of management consulting and patron saint of maximising productivity, figures prominently in this book. Though Taylor died more than a century ago, some form of \u201cTaylorism\u201d \u2013 the idea that production workflows can be broken into discrete components, subdividing any process into a series of measurable systems \u2013 lives on in most workplaces today. The real issue, as O\u2019Connor sees it, isn\u2019t necessarily new technology but the assumptions that accompany it \u2013 the way \u201cseemingly neutral technological tools can smuggle powerful ideas into a marketplace by the back door\u201d. In the age of automation and AI, some of those ideas have to do with the interchangeability of human and machine contributions: \u201cIf you see human labour as one element to be optimised within a complex system that is planned and controlled from above,\u201d O\u2019Connor writes, \u201cthen you are likely to see the possibilities afforded by new technology in the same light.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still other assumptions have to do with the very purpose of work. As O\u2019Connor puts it: \u201cIf a machine\u2019s work is a little bit worse than a human\u2019s, but an awful lot cheaper and faster, that might be a trade some employers, clients, and customers are willing to make.\u201d (If you\u2019ve tried to assemble a piece of furniture with nonsensical AI-written instructions or become caught in an online customer service chatbot labyrinth, you\u2019ve experienced the effects of this tradeoff first-hand.)<\/p>\n
But employees and consumers aren\u2019t powerless. The most hopeful stories in the book show workers taking things into their own hands: the Writers Guild of America screenwriters who strike to set the terms of when and how AI can be used in scripts; the Dutch care workers who establish their own practice so they can tailor care to individual patients without strict time constraints.<\/p>\n
We Are Not Machines concludes on a note of caution: \u201cThe goal might be to make machines in our image,\u201d O\u2019Connor writes. \u201cBut what I fear is that \u2013 perhaps without even quite noticing \u2013 we remake ourselves in theirs.\u201d The good news? These are not yet settled questions, and the future of work is still something we have the power to shape.<\/p>\n