The House | “Reframing the debate from a binary discussion of winners and losers”: Yuan Yang reviews ‘We Are Not Machines’

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“I used to be a techno-optimist,” writes Sarah O’Connor, the Financial Times columnist, in her debut non-fiction book We Are Not Machines. After starting her career in journalism with a brief stint at The House magazine, O’Connor spent over a decade making a name for herself at the FT through her bold coverage of the world of work, including award-winning investigations into clothing sweatshops in Leicester and “shit-life syndrome” in Blackpool – both discussed in Parliament. O’Connor had seen plenty of bad jobs, she writes: “Why not turn over jobs like these… in which people are expected to work like machines – to the machines?”

Ten years on, O’Connor is not a techno-pessimist either. Instead, she thinks that economists and tech bosses are posing the wrong questions about the rise of artificial intelligence. Rather than pitting humans against machines, she wants to uncover the humans on both sides of the equation: workers, who sometimes try to use AI at work without supervision, and managers, trying to automate the workplace.

O’Connor’s favoured method of reporting is one that “gets [her] shoes dirty”, whether at an Amazon strike near Birmingham, down a mine shaft in Sweden, or on a home visit with a social care company in France.

At the heart of this book is an exploration of how humans not only make tools, but are shaped by them

But while all the people she interviews have access to roughly the same global suite of AI tools, what happens in each setting differs because of the human relationships within them. In one chapter, she visits a Swedish mine run by Boliden, a company that prides itself on its automation experiments. Here, union representatives have seats on the company board, and worked with the management to introduce self-driving, remotely monitored trucks to extend the lifespan and productivity of their mine. They negotiated to do this while preventing new tech features that the workers feared, such as excessive surveillance.

The result was a ‘Swedish compromise’, including Boliden asking its software supplier to redesign technology according to the union’s concerns. Both sides got a far better deal than they would have otherwise. A union official tells O’Connor that their members were “more friendly to doing new things”, and praised the doubling of productivity through automation. In O’Connor’s telling, the fact that both sides had the power and information to be equal partners, and had worked with each other for decades, led to trust, which then led to the ability to navigate change effectively.

We Are Not Machines is an engrossing read that reframes the ongoing debate about technological change away from binary lists of winners and losers, and towards a discussion of power, politics and humanity. It is well-rooted in economic history yet brisk, taking in the development of factory management since the Industrial Revolution, and why John Ruskin rued that “it is not… the labour that is divided; but the men – divided into mere segments of men”.

At the heart of this book is an exploration of how humans not only make tools, but are shaped by them.

 “The future of work can be more worthy of the human mind, more careful of the human body, more satisfying to the human soul,” she concludes. “But not without a fight.”

Yuan Yang is Labour MP for Earley and Woodley

We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work

By: Sarah O’Connor

Publisher: Allen Lane