Synopsis
Automation, we were told, was meant to do away with dull and dangerous tasks, freeing us to pursue more fulfilling work. But AI now threatens to turn even creative tasks into dehumanizing labor.
Investigative journalist Sarah O’Connor has spent the last few years gathering stories of burned-out Amazon warehouse workers, Orwellian employee surveillance softwares, AI job interviews, translators frantically trying to keep up with machines, and truck drivers endlessly on the road.
As Sarah O’Connor writes, “Automation was meant to do away with dull, dirty, dangerous tasks. It was meant to free us up for more interesting and creative work. So why was my notebook filling up with stories of good jobs turned bad, and bad jobs turned worse? These people were not being liberated by machines. Instead, they were being crunched into systems run by machines and paced by machines, in which important concepts such as fairness, intelligence, even human-ness itself, were being quietly redefined by machines. And that left me with a question. A question that prompted me to write this book. We think we’re robotizing our work, but what if we’re actually robotizing ourselves?”
Our fear that machines will make us more robotic, O’Connor argues, is not new and has its origins in the industrial revolution, when workers fought against the expectation that they should toil like tireless machines. Inspired by campaigners from nineteenth-century English cotton mills to twenty-first century Swedish mines, O’Connor lays out a path where we can fight for work that is more respectful of our limits, and more worthy of the capacity of our minds.