What chance do we have versus the machines?

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0:38This is Eat Sleep, Work Repeat. It's a podcast about workplace culture. Hello, I'm Bruce Daisley. Now, will the computers steal our jobs? Will AI supplant us? It's a discussion that everyone keeps coming back to right now. I especially enjoy seeing it played out at grand scale. The sight of seeing Google's billionaire, former chief exec, Eric Schmidt, getting booed as he tried to sell the wonders of AI to scared class of 2026 was a moment of brief comic relief. But obviously, this is a genuine concern for a lot of people. Where are we going to be in five, 10 years? How does it affect us, our ability to pay for our lives?

1:24How is it going to impact the future that we've got ahead of us? There's a lot of people, of course, who say that the idea that half of all jobs will be replaced is nothing more than fuel to stimulate investors created by the bosses of these AI firms to try and suggest that somehow they are deserving of these vast amounts of investment that are going into them right now. So there's one belief that suggests that actually far from half of all jobs being automated, that typically technology, as it improves, creates more demand. And certainly that's been the case in the past. Other people say that the further you are away from a job, the easier you believe it can be automated.

2:09A truck driver looks very easy to automate when you're viewing it as a cell on a spreadsheet. But up close, you realise it involves a lot of details like navigating tight city centres or speaking to people or adjusting plans based on what's going on. It's not as easy to automate when you get up close. In the context of all of that comes a new book by Sarah O 'Connor. Now, Sarah, you've possibly read plenty of her stuff. She's a writer for the Financial Times. She's written about work for the FT for certainly a long time. I think she told me that she joined as a trainee. So she's been there for well over a decade.

2:46And she's written this new book, We Are Not Machines, which is a sort of up close reflection on the way that automation is impacting specific jobs, how actually it's not living up to the dream of replacing translators or the dream of replacing certain things. And more than anything, not only is it a up close, first hand exploration of what work looks like in 2026, but also it's a strong reminder of the unique qualities that humans have, the importance of craft, the importance of skill, the importance of actually doing things as a vocation and learning some strong capability for them. because of Sarah's position.

3:33It's a really good discussion that goes into the societal changes that are going on right now, how it's going to impact any of our jobs, the advice that she would give based on where we are. If you've had this discussion lately of whether AI is going to replace you and AI is going to steal your job, then Sarah's perspective is probably one of the most valuable contributions to firming up your own opinions. Here's my discussion with Sarah O 'Connor. Sarah, I wonder to kick off if you could just introduce who you are and what you do. Yeah, so I'm a journalist at the Financial Times newspaper in London.

4:13I've worked at the FTE 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. 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.

5:03How do you sort of think about that? How do you think about getting out and seeing people face to face? I mean, it's my absolute favorite part of the job and always has been. I 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. And 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.

5:38And so that's very much what I wanted to do in the book. And 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 know, whether it was the big sort of tech company CEOs and their massive predictions of, you know, 50 percent 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 um ai systems good at and then can we sort of figure out how jobs are going to be disrupted um 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 um so yeah I went to see people working in deep in a mine which 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 um how it actually feels to to start to go through a big period of technological change um 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.

7:17So 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. 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 inshittification, 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.

8:08So 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 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? 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.

9:00That 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, even as a journalist. Now, 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. You know, 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.

9:39But you're absolutely right that the particularly for the parts of translation that require that more creative, intuitive touch. I think there is a process of un-shitification happening. And that's on both sides of it, right? like both for the workers, for the job, is becoming enshitified 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 all kinds of things, make all kinds of human judgments about how this would go in the other language.

10:24So, for example, in English, we just say you. There's only one form of you, 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 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 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.

11:14But 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 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.

11:48You know, 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 know, 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 um and so a job that had been quite creative and human and meaningful was becoming quite mechanical actually you know it 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 um and so that feels to me like an end certification 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 um and what they've found is that since this new system came in whereby there'll be a machine translation with a sort of light human edit on top the quality of of subtitles has gone down dramatically you know not only are they less accurate but they're they don't feel quite human you know there's punctuation in strange places the the richness of the language seems to have diminished it's become a bit sort of flatter and and more constrained um and that that to me is quite sad and also it's the sort of loss that we might not be aware that we're experiencing um because if you're relying on a translation it's because you don't know the original language so you don't know you don't know what you're missing in a sense um and so 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.

13:28I 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, 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 development? substitution that, you know, 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.

14:15How do you see the discourse about job substitution right now? I find it very frustrating. I 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 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 So, you know, lots of journalists have been saying, I think I've used that language myself in the past.

14:57So 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?

15:29Who'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. It's 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 it's a 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.

16:04And 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.

16:38But I think this is really problematic because actually technological change is nothing like a natural phenomenon. You know, 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, you know, 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.

17:23And 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. And 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.

18:06So 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? It's really interesting because Tony Blair's intervention in politics 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 Howe, and she said a phrase which I thought was absolutely extraordinary. She said, AI is a political project.

18:44The central feature of that political project is taking agency away from everyone, which is broadly a theme of your book. You know, 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 sort of reflect on that, just both at a sort of individual level, how we've lost faith in ourselves, how we've been told that there's an inevitability and we need to stand back. But also at a sort of societal level, you know, it's really interesting. One of the contributions for the government's consultation on social media was made by the American government.

19:22And 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 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 greater span of control over our economies, greater 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.

20:02I mean, it's a lot to ask, but individual and societal level. 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 struggling to put my finger on until near the end, 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.

20:42You know, 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 at some point we suffer a sense of exhaustion. We can't continue to empathize 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 um and I sort of start to see this happening in all kinds of different places but what I realized doing 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 humans that I really don't think machines do match in any way I mean was that sort of the tactile intelligence of being able to do immensely sort of fine-grained work with your fingers I interviewed a grave tender 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.

22:16You 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 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.

23:09I mean, interestingly, and 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.

23:44And 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 realize is actually it's weirder than that. I think that they are now the last people to realize 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. 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.

24:21They'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. I 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.

25:24But I don't think the rest of us are there. And I think that 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. Are we going to end up with something that's unevenly distributed then? because I guess 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 more crafted solution if they've got money for it.

26:02And is it that then that effectively there'll be an incentivized product for most people but something more refined for those who are willing to pay for it? Is that one outcome that could happen? I 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 we do sort of notice when it when it disappears um so i hope that we won't lose a sense of craft and i think that that's still very much um 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 um or handmade clothes or hand sewn rugs um 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 um which might be lower quality but over time maybe we don't quite notice what we're losing um i mean i really take that idea too seriously until i 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 um the quality of the of the music was so much richer than what i now get listening to spotify when i did some research i realized that i wasn't imagining it wasn't nostalgia like actually the um 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 um 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 realized that's what I'd done that I had completely forgotten how good music used to sound um 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 um products that we listen to watch consume and that you know if if we lose that very very gradually we might sort of forget what we've lost yeah if you were to give someone a perspective then of having looked at this in depth you've seen you know you've you've painted some pretty bleak pictures of certainly inside Amazon warehouses, how mechanical the human jobs have become.

29:17And there's obviously a very fast line of those jobs even being eliminated themselves. And 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? I think what really makes the difference is whether you have the power to decide how and when to apply these new tools.

30:08So 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 um 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 um much more hopeful examples where if you're the 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 um might be really cool that customers might enjoy that might bring in more revenue or whatever it is basically the 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 the ai tools are massively changing how they work because basically no one writes code by hand anymore.

31:54That'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. He 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, no, that bit's rubbish. Actually, I think I'm going to do that bit myself because that bit really matters and requires my human taste. But that's because he 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 percent 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 um hollywood writers are in a very strong union um very unusually for america which isn't a particularly unionized place anymore but hollywood is one place that has very strong sectoral collective bargaining and they ended up going on strike you know a really long strike in which none of them um were paid because they really wanted to enshrine in the new contract that the contract doesn't say we won't use ai it 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 we will not be made to use it and we can't be made to use it in a way that is purely being done to cut costs.

33:41So 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. 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. They talk about these are the people who you go to supermarket, they're security guards. M &S don't employ their own security guards. They transfer them to an outsourced firm. And the people who are really going to 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 mean, the Amazon workers themselves, nowhere near that degree of impact.

34:32And 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 sort of 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 leave the income tax system?

35:28Where does that leave the way that we fund most of what government does right now? It's an interesting existential challenge of the moment that I don't think many governments are even debating. 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 policymakers, 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.

36:10Now, 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 voices 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 um 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 um 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 and shitified um because that's another way that you can exert power over employers to try and make work better after the pandemic there were huge labor 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 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 so 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 um sweden also has brought in this uh policy of like 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.

38:16So 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. You end the book saying that we need to have more faith in ourselves and be, I guess, as humans realize, wow, we're pretty accomplished. 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 a successful outcome here ahead of us well 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 oh this isn't anywhere near as good as we've been told it is or 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 um 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 you know um chat 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 you 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.

39:58And so I think if we also just try and invest in the stuff that matters to us and remember that.

40:37We'll see you next time.

40:53there 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 um 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 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.

41:45And 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 of the moment we're entering into then. That if big top-down cost-saving decisions are imposed upon an organization right now, So yeah, there's going to be some pretty crummy outcomes, actually. It's going to be, you know, service is going to go down, brand experience is going to go down.

42:26If 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. I agree. And I think that's a useful thing for the employers and the people who are making managerial decisions to hold onto as well. I think 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, oh, well, surely it will be soon.

43:03And 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. I'm 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.

43:39that 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. 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 the stuff you do with John Byrne Murdoch in the FT. So thank you so much for taking time to talk to us. Well, thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. Thank you to Sarah. Like I say, her book, We Are Not Machines, is actually out now.

44:14You can get that on the link in the show notes. I've been Bruce Taisley. If you're interested in this, the best place to go is always to check out the newsletter. And again, that's linked to in the show notes. See you next time.

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