FT Weekend Fest: How AI is really changing jobs

Murad Ahmed (0:01)

Hello, I'm Murad Ahmed, the FT's technology news editor. Tech Tonic will be back soon with new episodes. But in the meantime, here's one of my highlights from the recent FT Weekend Festival. A conversation between me and my FT colleague, Sarah O'Connor, about her new book. It's called We Are Not Machines, and it covers a really big topic, the impact that AI is having on jobs. We had a really interesting chat, so here it is.

Hello, my name is Murad Ahmed. I'm the technology news editor for the Financial Times, and I'm joined by Sarah O'Connor. Sarah is going to absolutely hate this bit, but I have to introduce her properly.

She's an FT columnist, reporter, and associate editor. She has won every journalism prize worth winning, including the Orwell Prize and the Wincott Award. Quite simply, she's one of the best journalists of her generation.

She's also the author of this, her debut book, We Are Not Machines, the best book I've read on how AI is changing the world of work. So early in Sarah's book, you write that we hear a lot about what the tech titans of the world, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, say is going to happen to jobs and the job market. But your book focuses on what is actually already happening. You do actual shoe leather reporting, you talk about getting your boots dirty. That's the focus of this conversation here. We're going to talk, if you want predictions of the future and an oracle, that's not what we're going to do. We're going to talk about what's actually happening and it might just give you some insights as to what's going to happen next and maybe even be a bit of a call to arms about what you can do to affect the future. Sarah, you split your book into three, mind, body and soul. So let's start with mind. You start with the translation industry and you start with a Czech translator, Peter. Do you want to explain why you start there, who Peter is and what is going on in that particular industry?

Sarah O'Connor (2:08)

Yeah. As you say Murad and thank you for that introduction. The reason I wrote this book really is that I'm like a shoe leather reporter at heart. What I like to do is to get out of the office, to get away from the kind of the C-suite interviews and just go and talk to people about what's really happening in the world and what that can tell us about how things are changing. And I felt that that was really sort of lacking in this whole debate about AI. It was so dominated, I felt, by these big picture predictions, some of them very utopian, we're all gonna end up working three hours a day and lying in our hammocks and reading poetry to each other. Or the kind of the really dystopian ones, Bill Gates is the latest, that all jobs are gonna be wiped out and we're gonna have to think of some sort of completely new way of organizing society.

And it was kind of frustrating to me for a couple of reasons. One is that these voices are all really coming from the top. They're coming from people often who actually have something to sell us, not that I think they're doing a brilliant job always on their PR, but they have a kind of vested interest and yet they're really dominating how we're trying to think about the economic impacts of this technology. And also because, as you say, I know because I write about the world of work that this technology has already entered all of our lives, it's entered all of our workplaces, it has already started to transform things. And while we were spending all of our time talking about predictions over how many jobs will be lost, all of the kind of obsession about the quantity of jobs, I was already starting to hear that actually the quality of jobs is starting to change, the nature of work, the way we feel about our work, whether it gives us satisfaction, and if so, how? All of that was starting to change, I thought in quite interesting ways. And so I really wanted to write a book that kind of, yeah, as you say, writes about what's actually happening and gives voice to people who maybe don't always get heard in this debate. I started with translators because they are very clearly on the front lines of this transition, they felt it first. And my sort of assumption had been, well, surely a lot of translators have simply lost their jobs now, because we all know that artificial intelligence and previous iterations of machine translation are pretty good.