Human Robots

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 dehumanising labour.

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 lorry drivers endlessly on the road. In Human Robots, she shows us that instead of robotizing our work, we may be robotizing ourselves.

But 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.