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About this talk

A tsunami of change, we are told, is sweeping the economy as robots and AI threaten to take over tasks done by humans. But while we worry that we're robotising our work, what if the real risk is that we're robotising ourselves? When prize-winning Financial Times journalist Sarah O'Connor set out to investigate what was happening on the front lines of technological change, she found people who weren't losing their jobs to machines, but who felt they were losing something else instead. From translators forced to edit AI output to university graduates interviewed by software and warehouse workers surrounded by robots, she heard stories of work becoming lonelier, less creative, less human. But O'Connor also found hopeful stories of jobs being made better, safer and more enjoyable – where workers haven't rejected the new tools, but instead have learned to control them. Exploring questions of power, design, institutions and ideas, her reporting shows that the way technology changes the world of work is not pre-determined, but must be contested and shaped by all of us. Inspired by stories from nineteenth-century English cotton mills to twenty-first century Swedish mines, We Are Not Machines reveals how we can fight for work which is more respectful of our limits, and more worthy of our minds.

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