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

A tsunami of technological change, we are told, is sweeping the world of work. While we once assumed automation might liberate us from boring drudgery and physical labour, it is now clear that AI is a greater threat to creative and cognitive tasks.
Orwell-Prize-winning Financial Times journalist and columnist Sarah O''Connor has spent the last few years gathering stories from the front lines of technological change. She has met the workers around the world who are being impacted first: the translators frantically trying to keep up with machines, the university graduates facing soulless AI interviewers, the freelancers using Orwellian surveillance software, the Hollywood writers on the picket line over technology. What these stories show us, she argues, is that instead of robotizing our work, we risk robotizing ourselves.
But her reporting also reminds us, as history has shown, that the direction of technological change is not pre-determined. Many of the more hopeful stories she encounters involve workers who haven''t rejected the tools of technology, but have learned to control them. 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.<>

Product details

• Authors: Sarah O'Connor
• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 25.06.2026
• EAN: 9780241704226
• ISBN: 978-0-241-70422-6
• No. of pages: 272
• Dimensions: 156 mm x 240 mm x 28 mm
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Technology > Electronics, electrical engineering, communications engineering; Disruptive Innovation, Robotics, SCIENCE / Biotechnology, TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Robotics, biotechnology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Sociology: work and labour, COMPUTERS / Artificial Intelligence / General