What chance do we have versus the machines?
Sarah O’Connor is a journalist for the Financial Times who specialises in writing about work and the evolution of our jobs. Over the last year or so that has meant a lot of reflection about AI job displacement.
In her new book, We Are Not Machines, Sarah reflects on how technological change is reshaping the workplace – and the invisible enshittification it often brings with it. Sarah has a strong message: firstly that we should have more belief in the unique strengths of human labour, and secondly that individual agency is the most important differentiator in our favour.
It’s a brilliant conversation that gives a flavour of her book.
Transcript
Bruce
Sarah, I wonder to kick off if you could just introduce who you are and what you do.
Sarah
I’m a journalist at the Financial Times newspaper in London. I’ve worked at the FT since 2007, so almost 20 years now, joined as a graduate trainee. And I write about the world of work and have done that for quite a long time. And most recently, I’ve just finished writing a book about work and technological change, which is called We Are Not Machines, The Fight for the Future of Work.
Bruce
I guess what I love about your columns, typically, I always remember the old John Le Carre quote, which is, a desk is a dangerous place to view the world. And the thing about your columns and very much about the book that you’ve written is that it’s all informed by you going out and meeting people, doing things and not necessarily trying to strike opinions or create opinions from FT HQ. How do you sort of think about that? How do you think about getting out and seeing people face to face?
Sarah
I mean, it’s my absolute favourite part of the job and always has been. think, you know, over the years, I’ve had to do my fair share of, you know, just sitting down in corner offices with CEOs and CFOs and heads of HR and interview them. that’s fine. You know, that can be interesting. But actually, the bit that has always sort of brought me the most pleasure and the most interest and taught me the most surprising things has been to just get out on the road with my notebook, you know, go and stand at the factory gates and talk to people as they’re coming in and out.
And so that’s very much what I wanted to do in the book. And that was partly because I felt that the whole debate about AI and automation was sort of dominated by people sitting at their desks, you whether it was the big sort of tech company CEOs and their massive predictions of, you know, 50 % of white collar workers are about to be wiped out, or whether it was these sort of very careful analyses that are being done by economists where they look at, they get a whole load of big spreadsheets and they basically look at every single job and they break the jobs down into constituent tasks and then they look at well what are the new AI systems good at and then can we sort of figure out how jobs are going to be disrupted and I just felt that all of this was very abstract, very top-down and I was just sort of desperate to just get out of the office and go and talk to people who are already experiencing these systems in their real lives, right, because this is happening now. It’s not as if we need to rely on just predictions anymore. So yeah, I went to see people working in deep in a mine, is now automating very heavily and they have self-driving trucks driving down there. I spent a few days shadowing a community nurse in the Netherlands. I talked to translators, software developers, scientists, all kinds of people who I hoped would be able to give me a sense of like what’s actually happening and give me the chance to sort of bring to everybody else an understanding of how it actually feels to start to go through a big period of technological change on the ground and also how people respond to that because people actually don’t just sort of sit back and do nothing when their job starts to change. We all actually have quite a lot of agency to decide what to do next about it. So I wanted to sort of present that to people as well, that this is not a story of us just sitting here in front of a big tsunami and waiting to find out if we sink or swim, that actually everyone reacts to change and they pivot away from risks or they seek out new opportunities. And that that is also an important part of the story that I felt wasn’t really being told very much.
Bruce
Yeah, the way that the story is typically told, there’s a few things that I to really jump off. The way that the story is typically told is that this is going to be massively enhancing and improving the way that things get done. But certainly your examination of translators made me immediately think that this is just another area of inshitification that actually technology was, I guess I need to get into the specifics, but you said that quite often The art of translation is trying to capture in a different language, the tone of voice of someone. So that might be the metaphor they use or the humor they use. And if you merely substitute one noun for a noun and a verb for a verb, then what you lose is the art, the poetry of the language. You use what that character is, the essence of what that character is about. Merely by just trying to do a transcription, you lose the beauty of it.
And it just felt like in gentrification, it just felt like a yet another example where technology sells us on progress efficiency, but somewhere humanity is lost along the way. And that was what I immediately sprung to there. Was that your feeling about that?
Sarah
It was a bit, yeah, I mean, I want to be careful in the sense that I think that the fact that we now have the ability to translate between all these different languages using very cheap or even free AI tools, like there are, that does that can be very useful to people, right? That does enable people to do new things that they couldn’t do before. And it might enrich some other people’s jobs, you know, even as a journalist. Now, you know, if I’m writing about a comparison between, let’s think of a column I wrote recently, I wrote about what’s been going on in Spain and Finland and why Spanish unemployment has been plunging and Finnish unemployment has been rising. No, I was able to use kind of translation tools to read lots of interesting reports in those languages. and educate myself in a much more interesting and better way. So I think there are definitely benefits that come, but you’re absolutely right that the, particularly for the parts of translation that require that more creative, intuitive touch.
I think there isn’t a process of en-shitification happening. And that’s on both sides of it, right? Both for the workers, for the job is becoming en-shitified in some way. And also for us as the people who then sort of consume the output. So yeah, I interviewed this wonderful guy who’s a, he translates the subtitles for TV shows from English into Czech. And he loves the job. It’s like his dream job because he loves TV anyway. He’s an amazing linguist. And he says that it’s so fun because you, you know, you’re watching a scene and you have to figure out out all kinds of things, make all kinds of human judgments about how this would go in the other language. So for example, in English, we just say you there’s only one form of view, whereas in Czech and lots of European languages, there’s a formal version and there’s an informal version. And people figure out for themselves, which which tense to use when they’re talking to each other depending on their relationships. And he said that he had to decide that for himself, you know, in every scene. Well, you know, these guys are colleagues, but they’re becoming a bit more friendly. Is this the point at which they would switch to the different form of view? And things like translating jokes, you know, they’re so sort of culturally specific.
But actually that’s a really fun challenge for a creative mind. And when you really nail it, you get a real sense of pleasure from it. And what’s happening to his job and to the jobs of other people that do that work is not that they’re being sort of cut out of the equation altogether, because the machine translations aren’t really good enough. But what’s happening is they’re now having to do something called machine translation post editing. So rather than being given the subtitles in English and translating it from scratch, they’re given a machine translation and they’re told to sort of tidy it up, check it’s accurate, try and make it sound a bit more human in inverted commas. But they’re asked to do this, you know, at twice the speed and for half the price. And so that instantly makes the job feel sort of faster and more intense. But also what he said to me, and what a lot of other translators said to me was that it’s just a completely different process in your mind, you’re not taking something in one language and then thinking how would I render this in my own language to convey the same meaning. It’s something that’s actually quite sort of cognitively difficult, but it’s not at all creatively satisfying. He said it was a bit like, you’re trying to count from one to 10, one, two, three, four, and someone’s just shouting random numbers in your ear at the same time that that’s sort of what it felt like. And so a job that had been quite creative and human and meaningful was becoming quite mechanical, actually, you know, sort of felt a bit more like a sort of production line job. And he knew what that was like, because he used to work on a on a factory floor before he became a translator. And so that feels to me like an en-shittification of that job, but also for the people who then consume those subtitles, you know, there have been studies that look at the quality of subtitles, and they, they rank them across all kinds of different metrics.
Sarah
And what they have found is that since this new system came in, whereby there’ll be a machine translation with a of light human edit on top, the quality of subtitles has gone down dramatically. Not only are they less accurate, but they don’t feel quite human. There’s punctuation in strange places. The richness of the language seems to have diminished. It’s become a bit sort of flatter and more constrained.
And that to me is quite sad. And also it’s the sort of loss that we might not be aware that we’re experiencing. Because if you’re relying on a translation, it’s because you don’t know the original language. So you don’t know what you’re missing in a sense. And so I think there will be some areas in which that is the way it goes, or that is the way that it is going.
Bruce
I guess to take a step back and to get some perspective, you say since you were commissioned to write the book, so much changed and I guess the process, know, people would be astonished how long it takes from the submission of a proposal to the publication of a book. How do you view the discourse right now about AI job substitution, you know, the
The Dario Amadei, 50 % of knowledge workers, he’s probably the indelible line in the sand that a lot of people have seen. And depending on whether the AI companies are trying to pump up the tires or to win back public approval, they sort of, they march forwards or backwards over that line. How do you see the discourse about job substitution right now?
Sarah
I find it very frustrating. think the thing that strikes me and I started to notice it a lot during the course of writing the book is that we so often are told about these new technologies through the form of metaphors and they’re often these metaphors from the natural world, right? So we’re told there’s a big wave of change coming, there’s a tsunami of change which is about to hit us and nobody’s ready for it and policymakers aren’t ready for it and this is something that a lot of the technology company chief executives have been saying, but also, you know, lots of journalists have been saying, I think I’ve used that language myself in the past. So I’m not sort of casting aspersions on others. It’s a, I understand why we turn to those metaphors, because it does feel a bit frightening. And for a lot of people, it feels like it’s just come out of nowhere, right? A bit, a bit like the way a tsunami would. But the problem with those metaphors is that they really shape what we think is a kind of a reasonable and an unreasonable response to what’s happening. So if you think that a tsunami is coming at you,
What is it reasonable to do? It’s reasonable to try and sort of forecast and plan ahead. It’s reasonable to try and figure out like, where is this wave going to hit? Who’s going to be most affected? And it’s reasonable to think about how are we going to mop up the damage afterwards? How are we going to compensate people who’ve lost their homes or their livelihoods? And that’s pretty much where policymakers have ended up focusing their attention is like forecasting and then trying to think about, well, what do we, how do we compensate people who lose their jobs?
What is it unreasonable to think about if you think of it as tsunami? It’s completely unreasonable to say, I’ve got some say over the pace at which this wave is coming. I want to have some say over what it does and doesn’t do. And so these metaphors are quite useful, I think, for the people who are pushing the technology because they invite us to think that we don’t have a say over the actual pace of change or the nature of change that it’s not possible to say yes to some uses of new technology and no to other uses that it’s something that’s just going to happen and we just have to kind of adapt to it and nobody wants to look like the fool who thinks you can hold back the tide right and so I think I perceive that a lot in the way that politicians talk about AI that they’re really anxious about looking as if they don’t get it but I think this is really problematic because actually Technological change is nothing like a natural phenomenon. The way in which technology changes the world is partly about what the tech can do. But it’s also an awful lot about the institutions that are in place, the regulations, the consumer demand. Do consumers actually at some point say, these subtitles are so bad, I’m not going to watch this show anymore. Actually, I don’t want to watch AI Slop on my TV and I’m not going to pay for it. all kinds of different ways in which what happens is shaped by humans, human institutions, individual choices, collective choices, and within the workplace is very much shaped by the balance of power in each individual workplace. And that was something that really came across to me when I was out doing the research for the book that, you know, there were some places where things were going really well, actually, and work was being improved and made better by technology and there were other places where the opposite was happening and that was a lot less about the technology than it was about all of the other choices and institutions and balances of power that were taking place. So I think the discourse has been too thin and has been missing this kind of middle part but what I think is happening right now is a lot of people are kind of waking up from that and they’re starting to ask questions that begin with should rather than questions that just begin with will, which I think is a very good thing. So I’m hoping that this book is arriving at a moment where people are already starting to say, well, hang on, what is the problem to which this would be the solution? And what about some problems that I would like it to be a solution to? How could we direct change in more useful directions?
Bruce
It’s really interesting because Tony Blair’s intervention in politics a couple of months, a couple of weeks ago, spoke specifically about how we’ve got no choice, this is coming, so we need to embrace it. In fact, I saw the author of Empires of AI, Karen Hao, and she said a phrase which I thought was absolutely extraordinary. She said, AI is a political project. The central feature of that political project is taking agency away from everyone which is broadly a theme of your book. You talk about we’ve lost faith in ourselves and we’ve lost faith in what humans are able to do. I’d love you to reflect on that, but just both at a of individual level, how we’ve lost faith in ourselves, how we’ve been told that this is an inevitability and we need to stand back, but also at a sort of societal level. It’s really interesting. One of the contributions for the government’s consultation on social media was made by the American government. And the American government said, we really strongly hope that the UK doesn’t ban social media for young people, because it would have an impact on our relationship. Now, in the context of thinking about governmental impact, sort of assessment of technological change, that’s one of the things that’s really going to play a part in our lives in the next 10 years, are we going to allow US AI companies to have great span of control over our economies, great span of control, maybe over, I mean, are we going to tax them? How are we going to raise revenue from them? I’d just love you to reflect on agency on those two levels, if you could, individual, I mean, it’s a lot to ask, but individual and societal level.
Sarah
You’re right that that is a huge theme in my book on both of those levels. And yeah, one of the sort of feeling that I kept having when I was doing the reporting that I was sort of struggling to put my finger on until near the end was, was yeah, that we were somehow losing faith in ourselves or there were some people who had interest in the idea that we would lose faith in ourselves. You know, we keep being told that these machines are better than us at almost everything, and that soon they will be better than us at absolutely everything, you know, whether that’s cognitive work or emotional work, even, you know, that I read a paper recently by some academics who said that machines are now better at empathy than humans are. Because they said they don’t have some of the failures of human empathy, like the fact that we you we at some point we suffer a sense of exhaustion, you know, we can’t continue to empathize sort of all day long, whereas machines can. Now, to me, that’s really troubling, because that is not a failure of human empathy. That’s a feature of human empathy. That’s what human empathy is. If it was inexhaustible, it wouldn’t be what empathy is. But we’re kind of redefining or slowly allowing some of our quite precious words and concepts to be kind of redefined in their meanings without us quite noticing it. So a machine can express something that sounds like empathy, but it can’t actually have empathy because it doesn’t feel. And I sort of start to see this happening in all kinds of different places. But what I realized during the reporting for the book was that I met so many people who had all kinds of different intelligences that I really don’t think machines do match in any way. I whether that’s sort of the tactile intelligence of being able to do immensely sort of fine grained work with your fingers. I interviewed a gravetender who uses all of these tools that he’s figured out for himself, what’s the best tool for the job to kind of clean up a bedraggled marble graveyard and to pluck the kind of dried pieces of grass out of the gravel. You know, that kind of care and dexterity machines are nowhere near being able to achieve. Or, you know, I spent some time with a palliative care nurse who was able to sit next to a woman as she was dying and reassure her that it was okay and that she would look after her husband and that it was time to go.
And I don’t think that we will ever see machines that have that level of emotional intelligence or intimacy. And more importantly, I don’t think that we should, you know, that there are some things that actually, there are some relationships, there are some types of work in which I just don’t think machines are appropriate. And so I feel like we need to sort of rediscover a little bit of confidence in
in who we are as humans and that we do have more agency than we might be led to believe to kind of shape this stuff and to decide what we want from it and what we don’t want from it. I mean, interestingly, this has only actually occurred to me after I finished the book, as I’ve been reading some really good kind of anthropological reporting coming out of Silicon Valley. I think I used to think that the people in the AI labs, the people who are kind of pushing this technology forwards, saw all of the rest of us as like non-player characters. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this word from the kind of tech bro world kind of insult, which means a non-player character is someone in a video game who’s like, they’re just in the background, no one’s controlling them, they’re just there to kind of make your game seem more interesting in some way. And I thought that they saw themselves as the masters of the universe and the rest of us as non-player characters who would just kind of submit to whatever they were doing. What I’ve come to realise is actually it’s weirder than that. I think that they are now the last people to realise that they have agency here. There’s a kind of mindset that has developed in Silicon Valley which is that the technology is just going to do what it’s going to do and that they have no ability to stop or to change direction that all you know a lot of people are saying they’re really worried about the future they’re worried that the median person is going to lose their job they’re worried that these kind of super intelligences that they’re trying to build might kill everyone but what they don’t think they can do is stop and I think this is a really interesting sort of psychological moment and
I don’t know if you’ve ever read the work of Neil Postman. He was a brilliant kind of social theorist writing in the 80s and the 90s. Really prophetic. mean, I hope that they reprint some of his books because they were so good. When I was working on my book, I read a book that he wrote in the 90s called Technopoly, where he could already foresee this philosophy beginning to emerge, which I think we’re now really seeing kind of crystallized in places like Silicon Valley, which is basically a sort of a submission to technology that actually sort of give up on the idea that humans have agency or even should have agency over the direction of travel and that you kind of give up and just allow technology itself to set the direction to set, you know, any sense you might have of kind of moral purpose. But I don’t think the rest of us are there. And I think that’s if we sort of give ourselves a little shake and try and sort of get out of this feeling of being rabbits in the headlights, the rest of the world is probably going to start to try and put their hands on the steering wheel here and I think that would be a very good thing.
Bruce
Are we going to end up with something that’s unevenly distributed then? Because I guess, you know, one of the things that you talk about is that automation will result in the end of craft or reduction in craft. But I guess people have always had the option of having a highly, a more crafted solution if they’ve got money for it. And is it that then that, you know, effectively there’ll be an insidified product for most people, but something more refined for those who are willing to pay for it. Is that one outcome that could happen?
Sarah
think it’s one possible outcome. I mean, I don’t think that I do predict the end of craft. I really hope there won’t be an end to craft because I think one of the things that I loved most about the book was actually talking to so many different people about the craft that they put into their own work. And it’s only when you really sit down with someone and talk to them about how they do their jobs, do you realize how much care and attention and experience goes into all manner of work, you know, lots of things that we don’t really notice or see, but then we do sort of notice when it disappears. So I hope that we won’t lose a sense of craft. And I think that that’s still very much something that we can fight for. But there is, you know, there is one sort of dystopian outcome that you can easily imagine, which is, as you say, that there will remain a market for handcrafted creativity, just as there is a market now for handcrafted pottery or handmade clothes or hand-sewn rugs, but that they will become relatively more expensive and therefore they’ll become the preserve of the rich and then everyone else sort of ends up putting up with, you know, sort of AI remixes of previous iterations of human creativity, which might be lower quality, but over time maybe we don’t quite notice what we’re losing.
I mean, I really take that idea too seriously until I recently found my old CD player in my parents’ house and I put a CD in and some batteries and it still worked. And I could not believe the quality of the sound coming out of this old CD player from, you know, 20 years, 25, 30 years ago. I got it when I was 11, I think. The quality of the music was so much richer than what I now get listening to Spotify. When I did some research, I realised that I wasn’t imagining it wasn’t nostalgia, like actually, the kind of amount of bits per minute or whatever the metric is, is much, much lower when you’re streaming music through Spotify, particularly if you’re doing it on the kind of cheap level, which is what I do. Which, you know, that might be fine. That might be a choice that I’ve made, right, to trade much more variety and access to many more songs for like lower quality. But what freaked me out a little bit was that I hadn’t actually realised that’s what I’d done, that I had completely forgotten how good music used to sound. And I think it is possible that over time we forget how good we had it and how good it was when actually there was a huge amount of creative work to be done in all kinds of different products that we listen to, watch, consume and that you know, if we lose that very, very gradually, we might sort of forget what we’ve lost.
Bruce
Yeah, if you were to give someone a perspective then of having looked at this in depth, you’ve seen, you you paint some pretty bleak pictures of certainly, you know, inside Amazon warehouses, how mechanical the human jobs have become. And that these are obviously a very fast line of those jobs even being eliminated themselves. And you know, other roles where the enjoyment of them has gone either by work intensification, that’s quite often the thing that’s been done. But if you were, therefore, from all of your perspective, to give someone a survival guide of either how they should think about their own job and protecting their job, ensuring that they’ve got something to do in 10 years, where would you advise them to? swim towards or skate towards, what’s the advice that you’d give to people?
Sarah
I think what really makes the difference is whether you have the power to decide how and when to apply these new tools.
There are some quite dystopian examples in the book and they’re all examples to go back to your point about agency. They’re all examples where actually the tools have just been introduced to the workflow in a way that the workers had no say over and in which they are often being used to kind of plug the inadequacies of the machines in one way or another. So that’s the case with those translators. It’s also the case in the Amazon warehouse. Now the machines can do enough, there’s robots in Amazon warehouses that can do a lot of the work, but the one bit they still can’t do is to pick different sized items out of shelves. So now the humans are literally standing in one place all day for 10 hours a day, just doing that bit. And the robots are bringing the shelves to the workers. But of course, now they’re setting the pace. So that’s the way you don’t want it to go. But I did also see lots of much more hopeful examples where if you’re the person who gets to say, I think it would be really great if I could use an LLM to offload this part of my work, which actually is time consuming and boring and doesn’t matter very much. Or actually, you know, we could use these new coding tools to create something new that might be really cool that customers might enjoy that might bring in more revenue or whatever it is. Basically, the places where employers trust their workers to experiment a bit and to figure out for themselves how to enrich their own jobs with these tools, it’s going much better. And sometimes that happens because that’s just the culture in the workplace, in that particular workplace. Sometimes it happens because those workers are very well paid and quite scarce. So senior software developers are mostly having quite a good time of it. You know, the AI tools are massively changing how they work because…
Sarah
Basically, no one writes code by hand anymore. That’s a huge change. But if you’re a really senior software developer, it’s kind of allowing you to do loads more cool stuff. My brother’s a software developer. says it makes you feel sort of superhuman because he’s in control. And so he’s sending all these AI agents out to do all this stuff. He’s checking it. He’s like, that bit’s rubbish. Actually, I think I’m to do that bit myself because that bit really matters and requires my human taste. But that’s because he has the choice. And then there are people who have basically had to fight for that.
Right, so I interviewed some Hollywood writers who could see the writing on the wall, so to speak, when these new large language models emerge, they could imagine that they might end up being put into the position that the translators are now in, that they might be given machine scripts by the studios and told, okay, this is like a this is sort of 80 % of the way there with a new kind of Marvel film or whatever, can you just finish it off? And they could foresee that that would be much less enjoyable, that would be worse for the end consumer and they would get paid a lot less to do it. And so they made it a crucial part of their collective negotiations with the studios. Hollywood writers are in a very strong union, very unusually for America, which isn’t a particularly unionized place anymore, but Hollywood is one place that has very strong sexual collective bargaining.
Sarah
And they ended up going on strike, you know, a really long strike in which none of them were paid because they really wanted to enshrine in the new contract that the contract doesn’t say we won’t use AI. says we will be the ones to choose. So we can use AI if we all agree that that will improve the end quality, but we will not be made to use it. And we can’t be used it made to use it in a way that is purely being done to cut costs. So
I think my advice would be to try and fight for your right to decide for yourself and that’s going to be much easier for some people than others. I’m not naive about that but I think that is the key difference here.
Bruce
What I end up worrying about though, is I’ve done a little bit of work with the Living Wage Foundation and they talk about invisible workers. talk about these are the people who you go to supermarket, they’re security guards. &S don’t employ their own security guards. They transfer them to an outsourced firm. And the people who are really gonna struggle, it’s wonderful to hear about the unionized workers in Hollywood screenwriting, but these millions and millions of jobs that have just got nowhere near that degree of market power, nowhere near, I the Amazon workers themselves, nowhere near that degree of impact. And I guess the thing you end up concluding is that while Dario Amadei’s 50 % might have been wrong, there is going to be people whose jobs are uplifted by technology and there is going to be people whose jobs are cast into shadow by technology and made a lot harder. And to some extent, market power will have an impact on that organization. It’s to some extent why we need our governments to protect us or our governments to stand up to technology companies to help us here, I think. It’s an interesting moment because looking down the road, you’d start saying, well, we need to think about what’s the plan to tax these technology companies because if they’re stealing such significant parts of the value created in the economy, then where does that lead the income tax system? Where does that lead the way that we fund most of what government does right now? an interesting existential challenge of the moment that I don’t think many governments are even debating.
Sarah
Yeah, and I think you’re right that clearly there are some people who just do not have the level of market power or power from institutions like trade unions. And so for policy makers, I don’t think that there is a sort of neat set of levers you can pull to make sure that this goes well in every workplace. But I think that what does make sense for them to do is to try and think of what can policy do to give people more power. Now, there’s like a couple of ways that you can think about power when it comes to changing your circumstances in the world of work. And economists sometimes talk about voice or exit. So voice is like your ability to speak up at work, or to have a seat at the table. You know, one of the places I went to in the book was Sweden, where they have these very formal systems whereby
every time something new changes in terms of technology at work, the workers and the employers have to sit down together at the same table literally and negotiate how it’s going to go.
So there are places in which you can try and strengthen people’s right to have a voice. But if you can’t do that, or in places where that’s not likely, for example, like your outsourced security guards, or gig economy workers, you know, there’s lots of people where that’s really difficult. You can also make it easier for people to exit, basically, make it easier for people to walk away from bad work, or from work that is becoming enshitified. Because that’s another way that you can exert power over employers to try and make work better.
after the pandemic, there were huge labour shortages. And what happened was a lot of employers suddenly had to make their jobs better. They had to push up the wages, they had to offer more remote working, even for like people like hourly shift workers, you were starting to see much better benefits, much better shift patterns on offer. And that was simply because they needed the staff. And so thinking about how do you make it
Sarah
easier for people to walk away and look for something better for themselves, you know, give people more agency in their lives in that way. And I think the best way to do that is to have a really good, strong safety net, you know, that if you leave a job, you’re not suddenly completely on the breadline that you have some months in which your income is protected so that you have the time and the headspace to think about what’s next.
Sweden also has brought in this policy of lifelong learning whereby you can effectively go on furlough from your job for up to a year and get paid 80 % of your pay while you train in something new. So there are ways that you can try and sort of strengthen people’s ability to fight for themselves. And if I was a policymaker, that’s probably the area that I would be looking in.
Bruce
You end the book saying that we need to have more faith in ourselves and be, I guess as humans realize, wow, we’ve, we’re pretty accomplished at dealing with the nuance, the art, the craft of things. We need to have more faith. As we finish now, how do you think we should achieve that? How do you think in this moment right now, any of us should be confident that we’ve got a successful career ahead of us or successful outcome here ahead of us.
Sarah
I think as people start to encounter these new machines for real in their jobs, I think it dawns on a lot of people themselves that actually, this isn’t anywhere near as good as we’ve been told it is, yes, this is fine at some things, but it doesn’t have my ability to kind of exert subtle human judgment over this. So I think that people are kind of realizing it for themselves. And I guess my advice would be to pay attention to what’s happening in your own world rather than…
the kind of big headlines that keep coming at you. I also sort of hope that in a way that my book is a sort of a bit of a manifesto for what machines can’t do, know, Chuck GPT can’t put its boots on and go down a mine and talk to the miners about how they feel about the fact that their jobs are changing. know, Claude can’t go and hang out with a
community nurse and really understand what the relationship is between her and the people that she looks after. And so I think if we also just try and invest in the stuff that matters to us and remember that there is a richness to the human experience that we’re not going to get from machines and that that’s absolutely fine. You know, they can be a tool to do things that we don’t want to do.
rather than something that is trying to be everything that we are. Like, what is the problem to which that is the solution and whose problem is it?
Bruce
I saw someone saying that the further away from a job you are, the more you believe it can be automated. And it’s only when you’re sort of hands on doing the specifics, you realize how it’s more complicated than that. And I guess the takeaway for me is that it raises a really key question, partly about agency and partly about whether decisions are going to be made top down from a great distance or whether there’s going to be people on the ground, you know.
that sort of are going to have some degree of discretion. And the thing that always comes to my mind is that in that Gallup workforce survey, where they say 10 % of British workers are engaged with their jobs, and principally they say, Gallup in their work, they say, most workers know how they would do their job better. But they’re never given the autonomy, the agency, the opportunity to make those decisions. And
That’s a really important context at the moment we’re entering into then. That if big top-down cost saving decisions are imposed upon an organization right now, yeah, there’s going to be some pretty crummy outcomes actually. It’s going to be, you know, services is going to go down, brand experience is going to go down. If there’s a degree of discretion and empowerment, then yeah, this might actually be enhancing. And that’s my overall takeaway of where we are right now.
Sarah
I agree and I think that’s a useful thing for the employers and the people who are making managerial decisions to hold on to as well. think there are, we are starting to see some companies making quite big layoffs and saying it’s because AI is coming. What’s interesting about that is that it seems almost preemptive. It’s not necessarily because they know that the AI is already capable of doing all those jobs, but they just think, well, surely it will be soon. And so we want to get ahead of it.
I think we’re bound to see some quite bad consequences of that. And we’ll probably have to see some companies retrenching a bit and saying, oh, actually, that turned out to have been a disaster in terms of the quality of our products or our customer service. And we’re going to have to hire some humans back. sure that I’m sure that we will see some of that. But yeah, I think from the perspective of the people at the top, sort of remembering that
These tools can be really powerful if you put them in the hands of people who can figure out for themselves what is the best way to enrich their work with them. That is probably in the long run going to be more effective than some kind of top-down approach where you assume that you know how people do their jobs and then find out two months down the line that you were wrong.
Bruce
Absolutely. Sarah, I’m so grateful for the time you’ve taken to talk to us. Not only did I love the book, but I really love your regular columns and your stuff you do with John Byrne Murdoch in the FT. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Sarah
Thank you for having me, I enjoyed it.
