A robot magician called D4YRL was rejected as a member of the Magic Circle last week, for being insufficiently human.<\/p>\n
While D4YRL\u2019s tricks were exemplary, the august organisation decided \u201che\u201d did not engage the audience\u2019s emotions as a flesh-and-blood performer would.<\/p>\n
With robotics and AI now advancing at breakneck speed, it was the latest example of an organisation forced to confront questions that were once the province of philosophy \u2013 such as what it means to be human.<\/p>\n
In her enjoyable new book, We Are Not Machines, the FT journalist Sarah O\u2019Connor takes a long, hard look at one pressing aspect of this problem: how AI is changing our jobs and perhaps, in the process, changing us.<\/p>\n
She spends time with Amazon employees whose tasks are constantly surveilled, and with invisible staff thousands of miles away in India and Costa Rica, watching hours of mind-numbing video footage, to train the AI systems monitoring the warehouses.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe think we\u2019re robotising our work, but what if we\u2019re robotising ourselves?\u201d she asks.<\/p>\n
She talks to translators who feel the joy has drained out of their work, now that they spend their days correcting mediocre AI-generated text for a fraction of the pay instead of exercising their creativity \u2013 a job known as machine translation post-editing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to have something creative, but I\u2019m not sure that I can have a creative job that\u2019s not endangered,\u201d one translator, Petr, tells her. \u201cEverywhere you step, there\u2019s AI.\u201d<\/p>\n
An engineer debugs robots at a robotics company in China. Photograph: China News Service\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Importantly, O\u2019Connor also reviews the growing evidence that we may be reading, thinking and understanding less as we lean on technological shortcuts \u2013 potentially changing the very nature of human intelligence.<\/p>\n
Her conclusion is not that we should resist AI altogether but that we should think more carefully about which aspects of work should be automated \u2013 joining, as the book\u2019s subtitle puts it, The Fight for the Future of Work.<\/p>\n
Just because a robot may technically be able to perform a task, for example, we shouldn\u2019t necessarily accept that it should. O\u2019Connor makes that point powerfully as she watches a Dutch nurse caring for an elderly patient at home with a humour and empathy that a robot carer couldn\u2019t provide, any more than D4RYL can master a magician\u2019s patter.<\/p>\n
\u201cTechnology is designed by people, made by people, and adopted by people. And it is perfectly reasonable for policymakers, business leaders, workers and consumers to say \u2018yes\u2019 to some uses of new technology, or workplace changes induced by technology, and \u2018no\u2019 to others,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Billionaire tech bros speak with disarming certainty about the coming dominance of AI, with knock-on effects for human workers, who demand to be paid, take holidays and gossip about their weekends.<\/p>\n
In her reporting, however, O\u2019Connor uncovers stark differences in the way technology is affecting people\u2019s working lives, depending on their bargaining power over the way it is introduced.<\/p>\n
In Sweden, where union-employer negotiation is deeply embedded in the country\u2019s economic model, she visits a mine in Renstr\u00f6m where staff and bosses worked together on bringing in the autonomous underground trucks that now whiz along 800 metres below the earth\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n
And she talks to organisers of the Hollywood writers\u2019 strike, whose leverage over the studios allowed them to win considerable control over whether and how AI is deployed in the creative process.<\/p>\n
For the majority of workers, who lack the writers\u2019 clout, it may have to be governments that set the boundaries, though. In the UK the Trades Union Congress and the thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research have called for employees to be given the right to negotiate before new technology is deployed in their workplace \u2013 although ministers may be cautious, given their enthusiasm for AI as a great hope for boosting productivity.<\/p>\n
While it isn\u2019t O\u2019Connor\u2019s main focus, the disproportionate influence wielded by the men behind the models is another cause to fret about our reliance on them.<\/p>\n
Fighting back feels especially important this week, as the SpaceX IPO consolidated Elon Musk\u2019s extraordinary economic power<\/a> \u2013 days after he was accused of using his ownership of X to incite racist riots<\/a> on the streets of the UK, claims that he rejected.<\/p>\n