Sarah O’Connor’s We Are Not Machines lands in US stores on August 11 via Godine. It’s already out in the UK from Allen Lane. New Scientist points to it as the way forward. Or maybe the warning.
Stream those movies? The subtitles feel flat now. Petr Čermoch is a translator in the Czech Republic. He notices it first. The AI generates the script. He just fixes it. The money is gone though. Agencies cut pay for the new workflow.
The job gets harder. Less joy. More eyes on screens. One original text. One machine output. Constant switching.
“It’s just a tedious job.” Čermoch says it is boring. Lifeless.
This isn’t a surprise to O’Connor. She writes for the Financial Times. Her weekly column covers work. She sees this everywhere.
The debate used to be “Will AI take my job?”
That ship sailed. We are reshaping ourselves to fit the machine.
Look at translation. We accept bland output because it is cheaper. Then copywriters try to mimic the robot. Their articles rank too well with Google. The algorithm assumes it’s AI. So the human writes worse on purpose. They use “humanizer” tools to inject errors. Grammar mistakes. Punctuation fails. Errors of meaning.
Is this really the future? O’Connor thinks it deforms us.
She avoids Silicon Valley executives. No PR spins here. She goes to the factory gates. Sweden’s mines. US truck hubs. Global voices.
Frederick Winslow Taylor did this in 1911. Management consultants stripping autonomy from workers. Tell them what to do. Tell them how. Give them a timer.
AI turbocharged Taylor.
Take Maria in Costa Rica. Remote work. She watches 1200 short clips. Amazon warehouse footage. Cameras miss things. Maria finds them. Nine hours long. Target: 99.9 percent accuracy. Only three mistakes allowed across 8000 clips.
“You can’t be a machine.” Maria knows it. They expect it anyway.
Not all stories are dark. Sweden’s mines offer hope. Autonomous trucks move ore. Miners are safer. Productivity climbs.
Why the difference? Union power. The staff rejected real-time tracking of their movements. The data is anonymized now. They dictated terms.
O’Connor argues this. Acquiescence or resistance isn’t binary. There is negotiation.
Her subtitle calls it “the fight for the future of work.”
The book reads like great features sometimes. Less like a solution manual. She champions inherent human value though.
The real danger is not that we make machines in our image but that we remake ourselves in theirs.
She has practical advice too. Get involved early. Before leverage is gone.
Translators waited. Now they have nothing.
Hollywood writers bargained hard. They kept power while they had it. Join unions. Fight collectively.
For something lighter Joanna Stern wrote I Am Not a Robot. She is an ex-tech columnist for the Wall Street Journal. She used AI for a year. Everything from cleaning to medical tests.
It is uneven. A joke every few paragraphs distracts. Climate impacts get short shrift.
But the conclusion matches O’Connor’s. Stern says let AI assist. Do not let it think for you. Atrophy begins. Control slips.
The moment you let it do the thinking for you the atrophy begins and you lose control.
Stern warns us. Work with the tool. Do not become it.
Tom Knowles wrote this piece from London.
Other Books on the Topic
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Code Dependent by Madhumita Murgia (Financial Times ). How AI wrecks policing welfare health justice. Lives ruined by black box systems we don’t understand.
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The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby. A DeepMind biography. Covers founder Demis Hassabis. Shows how AI flips biology and chemistry upside down. Google bought them in 2014.
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Empire of AI by Karen Hao. The OpenAI story. Non-profit to cash grab. ChatGPT is just the start. The race is alarming. She thinks we are heading somewhere bad.
