What chance do we have versus the machines?

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Again? That's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to Stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply. This is It Sleepwork Repeat. It's a podcast about workplace culture. Hello, I'm Bruce Aisley. Now, will the computers steal our jobs? Will AI supplant us? It's the discussion that everyone keeps coming back to right now. I especially enjoy seeing it played out at grand scale. The site of seeing Google's billionaire former chief exec, Eric Schmidt, getting booed as he tried to sell the wonders of AI to a scared class of 2026 was a moment of brief comic relief. But obviously, this is a genuine concern for a lot of people. Where are we going to be in five, 10 years? How does it affect us, our ability to pay for our lives? How is it going to impact the future that we've got ahead of us? There's a lot of people, of course, who say that the idea that half of all jobs will be replaced is nothing more than fuel to stimulate investors created by the bosses of these AI firms to try and suggest that somehow they are deserving of these vast amounts of investment that are going into them right now. There's one belief that suggests that actually, far from half of all jobs being automated, that typically, technology, as it improves, creates more demand and certainly that's been the case in the past. Other people say that the further you are away from a job, the easier you believe it can be automated. A truck driver looks very easy to automate when you're viewing it as a cell on a spreadsheet, but up close you realise it involves a lot of details like navigating tight city centres or speaking to people or adjusting plans based on what's going on. It's not as easy to automate when you get up close. In the context of all of that comes a new book by Sarah O'Connor. Now Sarah, you've possibly read plenty of her stuff. She's a writer for the Financial Times newspaper in London. I think at the FT since 2007, so almost 20 years now, I joined as a graduate trainee. And I've always part of the world of work and I've done that for quite a long time. And most recently, I've just finished writing a book about work and technological change, which is called We Are Not Machines, The Fight for the Future of Work. I guess what I love about your columns typically, I always remember the old John le Carré quote, which is a desk is a dangerous place to view the world. And the thing about your columns and very much about the book that you've written is that it's all informed by you going out and meeting people doing things and not necessarily trying to strike opinions or create opinions from FT HQ. How do you, how do you sort of think about that? How do you think about getting out and seeing people face to face? I mean, it's my absolute favourite part of the job and always has been. I think, you know, over the years, I've had to do my fair share of, you know, just sitting down in corner offices with CEOs and CFOs and heads of HR and interviewed them. And that's fine. You know, that could be interesting, but actually the bit that has always sort of brought me the most pleasure and the most interest and taught me the most surprising things has been to just get out on the road with my notebook, you know, go and stand at the factory gates and talk to people as they're coming in and out. I spent a few days shadowing a community nurse in Netherlands. I talked to translators, software developers, scientists, all kinds of people who I hoped would be able to give me a sense of like what's actually happening and give me the chance to sort of bring to everybody else an understanding of how it actually feels to, to start to go through a big period of technological change on the ground and also how people respond to that because people actually don't just sort of sit back and do nothing when their jobs start to change. We all actually have quite a lot of agency to decide what to do next about it. So I wanted to sort of present that to people as well, that this is not a story of just sitting here in front of a big tsunami and waiting to find out if we sink or swim, that actually everyone reacts to change and they pivot away from risk or they seek out new opportunities. And that that is also an important part of the story that I felt wasn't really being talked very much. The way that the story is typically told is that this is going to be massively enhancing and improving the way that things get done. But certainly your, your examination of translators made me immediately think that this is just another area of inotification, that actually technology was, I guess I need to get into the specifics, but you said that quite often the art of translation is trying to capture in a different language, the tone of voice of someone. So that might be the metaphor they use or the humour they use. And if you merely substitute one noun for a noun and a verb for a verb, then what you lose is the, the art, the poetry of the language you use, what that character is, the essence of what that character is about. Merely by just trying to do a transcription, you lose the beauty of it. And it just felt like inotification. It just felt like a yet another example where technology sells us on progress, efficiency, but somewhere humanity is lost along the way. And that was what I immediately sprung to there. Was that your feeling about that? It was a bit, yeah. I mean, I want to be careful in the sense that I think that the fact that we now have the ability to translate between all these different languages using very cheap or even free AI tools. I don't know, that does, that can be very useful to people, right? That does enable people to do new things that they couldn't do before. And it might enrich some other people's jobs. You know, even as a journalist now, you know, if I'm writing about a comparison between, let's think of a column I wrote recently, I wrote about what's been going on in Spain and Finland and why Spanish unemployment has been plunging and Finnish unemployment has been rising. You know, I was able to use kind of translation tools to read lots of interesting reports in those languages and educate myself in a much more interesting and best way. So I think there are definitely benefits that come, but you're absolutely right that the, particularly for the parts of translation that require that more creative, intuitive touch, I think there is a bit of this kind of shiftification happening. And that's on both sides of it, right? Both for the workers, for the job is becoming shiftified in some way. And also for us as the people who then sort of consume the output. So yeah, I interviewed this wonderful guy who's a, he translates the subtitles for TV shows from English into Czech. And he loves the job. It's like his dream job because he loves TV anyway. He's an amazing linguist. And he says that it's so fun because you, you know, you're watching a scene and you have to figure out all kinds of things, make all kinds of human judgments about how this would go in the other language. So for example, in English, we just say you. There's only one form of the of you. Whereas in Czech and lots of European languages, there, there's a formal version and there's an informal version. And people figure out for themselves what, which hand to use when they're talking to each other, depending on their relationships. And he said that he had to decide that for himself, you know, in every scene, well, you know, these guys are colleagues, but they're becoming a bit more friendly. Is this the point at which we would switch to the, the different form of you? And things like translating jokes, you know, that are so sort of culturally specific. But actually that's a really fun challenge for a creative mind. And when you really nail it, you get a real sense of pleasure for it. Um, and what's happening to his job and to the jobs of other people that do that work is not that they're being sort of cut out of the equation altogether because the machine translations aren't really good enough. Um, but what's happening is they're now having to do something called machine translation post-editing. So rather than being given the subtitles in English and translating it from scratch, they're given the machine translation and they're told to sort of tidy it up, check it's accurate, try and make it sound a bit more human in And unreasonable, responsible things happening. So if you think that a tsunami is coming at you, what is it reasonable to do? It's reasonable to try and sort of forecast and plan ahead. It's reasonable to try and figure out, like, where is this wave going to hit? Who's going to be most affected? And it's reasonable to think about how are we going to mop up the damage afterwards? How are we going to compensate people who have lost their homes or their livelihoods? And that's pretty much where policymakers have ended up focusing their attention, it's like forecasting and then trying to think about, well, what are we, how do we compensate people who lose their jobs? What is it unreasonable to think about if you think that it's a tsunami? It's completely unreasonable to say, I've got some say over the pace at which this wave is coming. I want to have some say over what it does and doesn't do. And so these metaphors are quite useful, I think, for the people who are pushing the technology because they invite us to think that we don't have a say over the actual, the pace of change or the nature of change, that it's not possible to say yes to some uses of new technology and no to other uses, that it's something that's just going to happen and we just have to kind of adapt to it. And nobody wants to look like the fool who thinks you can hold back the tide, right? And so I think I, I perceive that a lot in the way that politicians talk about AI. They're really anxious about looking as if they don't get it. But I think this is really problematic because actually, technological change is nothing like a natural phenomenon. The way in which technology changes the world is, is partly about what the tech can do, but it's also an awful lot about the institutions that are in place, the regulations, the consumer demand, you know, do consumers actually at some point say, these subtitles are so bad, I'm not going to watch this show anymore. Actually, I don't want to watch AI slot on my TV and I'm not going to pay for it. All kinds of different ways in which what happens is shaped by humans, human institutions, individual choices, collective choices, and within the workplace is very much shaped by the balance of power in each individual workplace. And that was something that really came across to me when I was out doing the research for the book that, you know, there were some places where things were going really well actually, and work was being improved and made better by technology. And there were other places where the opposite was happening. And it was a lot less about the technology than it was about all of the other choices and institutions and balances of power that were taking place. And so I think the discourse has been, uh, too thin and have been missing this kind of middle part, but what I think is happening right now is a lot of people are kind of waking up from that and they're starting to ask questions that begin with should rather than questions that just begin with will, which I think is a very, a very good thing. So I'm hoping that this book is arriving at a moment where people are already starting to say, well, hang on, like, what is the problem to which this would be the solution? And what about some problems that I would like it to be a solution to? How, how could we direct change in useful directions? It's really interesting because Tony Blair's intervention in politics a couple of months, a couple of weeks ago spoke specifically about how we've got no choice. This is coming, so we need to embrace it. In fact, I saw the author of Empires of AI, Karen Howe, and she said, she, she said a phrase, which I thought was absolutely extraordinary. She said, AI is a political project. The central feature of that political project is taking agency away from everyone. Which is broadly a theme of, of your book. You know, you, you talk about we've lost faith in ourselves and we've lost faith in what humans are able to do. I'd love you to sort of reflect on that, that just both at a sort of individual level, how we've lost faith in ourselves, how we've been told that this is an inevitability and we need to stand back. But also at a sort of societal level, you know, it's really interesting. One of the contributions for the government's consultation on social media was made by the American government and the American government said, we really strongly hope that the UK doesn't ban social media for young people because it would have an impact on our relationship. Now, in the context of thinking about governmental assessment of technological change, that's one of the things that's really going to play a part in our lives in the next 10 years. Are we going to allow US AI companies to have greater span of control over our economy, greater span of control, maybe over, I mean, are we going to tax them? How are we going to, how are we going to raise revenue from them? I'd just love you to reflect on agency on those two levels, if you could, at individual, I mean, it's a lot to ask, but at individual and societal level. You're right that that is a, a huge theme in my book on both of those levels. And, you know, one of the, the sort of feeling that I kept having when I was doing the reporting and I was sort of struggling to put my finger on until near the end was, was that we were somehow losing faith in ourselves, or, or there were some people who are interested in the idea that we would lose faith in ourselves. Um, you know, we keep being told that these machines are better than us at almost everything. And soon they will be better than us at absolutely everything, you know, whether that's cognitive work or emotional work even, you know, that, um, I read a paper recently by some academics who said that machines are now better at empathy than humans are, because, they said, they don't have some of the failures of human empathy, like the fact that we, you know, we, at some point, we stop a sense of exhaustion, you know, we can't continue to empathize sort of all day long, whereas machines can now, to me, that's really troubling because that is not a failure of human empathy. That's a feature of human empathy. That's what human empathy is. If it was inexhaustible, it wouldn't be what empathy is, but we're kind of redefining or slowly allowing some of our quite precious words and concepts to be kind of redefined in their meanings without us quite noticing it. So a machine can express something that sounds like empathy, but it can't actually have empathy because it, it doesn't feel. Um, and I sort of, I sort of start to see this happening in, in all kinds of different places. But what I realized doing the reporting for the book was that I met so many people who had all kinds of different intelligences that I really don't think humans, that I really don't think machines do much in anyway. I mean, whether that's sort of the tactile intelligence of being able to do immensely sort of fine grained work with your fingers. I interviewed a grave tender who uses all of these tools that he's figured out for himself what's the best tool for the job to kind of clean up a, a deraggled marble graveyard and to pluck the kind of dried pieces of grass out of the gravel. You know, that kind of um, care and dexterity. machines are nowhere near being able to achieve. Or, you know, I spent some time with a palliative care nurse who was able to sit next to a woman as she was dying and reassure her that it was okay and that she would look after her husband and that it was time to go. And I don't think that we will ever see machines that have that level of emotional intelligence or intimacy. And more importantly, I don't think that we should, you know, that there are some things that actually, there are some relationships, there are some types of work in which I just don't think machines are appropriate. And so I feel like we need to sort of rediscover a little bit of confidence in, in who we are as humans and that we do have more agency than we might be led to believe to kind of shape this stuff and to decide what we want from it and what we don't want from it. I mean, interestingly, and this only actually occurred to me after I finished the book as I've been reading some really good kind of anthropological reporting coming out of Silicon Valley. I think I used to think that the people in the AI labs, the people who are kind of pushing this technology forwards, saw all of the rest of us as like non-player characters. I don't know if you're familiar with this word from the, the kind of tech bro world kind of insult, which means a non-player character is someone in a video game who's like, they're just in the background. No one's controlling them. They're just there to kind of make your game seem more interesting in some way. Um, and I thought that they saw themselves as the masters of the universe and the rest of us as non-player characters who would just kind of submit to whatever they were doing. What I've come to realize is actually, it's weirder than that. I think that they are, that they are now the last people to realize that they have agency here. There's a kind of mindset that has developed in Silicon Valley, which is, which is that the technology is, is just going to do what it's going to do and that they have no ability to stop or to shape the direction or the, you know, a lot of people are saying they're really worried about the future. They're worried that the median person's going to lose their job. They're worried that these kind of super intelligences that they're trying to build might kill everyone. But what they don't think they can do is stop. And I think this is a really interesting sort of That's just the culture in the workplace. In that particular workplace, sometimes it happens because those workers are very well paid and quite scarce. So senior software developers are mostly having quite a good time with it. You know, the AI tools are massively changing how they work because basically no one writes code by hand anymore. It's a huge change, but if you're a really senior software developer, it's kind of allowing you to do loads more cool stuff. My brother's a software developer. He says it makes you feel sort of superhuman because he's in control. And so he's sending all these AI agents out to do all this stuff. He's checking it. He's like, no, that bit's rubbish. Actually, I think I'm going to do that bit myself because that bit really matters and requires my human taste. But that's because he has the choice. And I know people who have basically had to fight for that, right? So I interviewed some Hollywood writers who could see the writing on the wall, so to speak. When these new large language models emerged, they could imagine that they might end up being put into the position that the translators are now in. That they might be given machine scripts by the studios and told, okay, this is sort of 80% of the way there with a new kind of Marvel film or whatever. Can you just finish it off? And they could foresee that that would be much less enjoyable. That would be worse for the end consumer. We would get paid a lot less to do it. And so they made it a crucial part of their collective negotiations with the studios. Hollywood writers are in a very strong union. Very unusually for the writers in the particular unionized place in the world, but Hollywood is one place that has very strong sectoral collective bargaining. And they ended up going on strike, a really long strike in which none of them were paid because they really wanted to ensure in the new contract that the contract doesn't say we won't use AI. It says we will be the ones to choose. So we can use AI if we all agree that that would improve the end quality, but we will not be made to use it and we can't be used, made to use it in a way that is purely being done to cut costs. So I think my advice would be to try and fight for your right to decide for yourself. That's going to be much easier for some people than others. I'm not naive about that, but I think that is the key difference here. What I end up worrying about, though, is I've done a little bit of work with the Living Wage Foundation, and they talk about invisible workers. They talk about these are the people who you go to supermarket, there's security guards. M&S don't employ their own security guards. They transfer them to an outsource firm. And the people who are really going to struggle, it's wonderful to hear about the unionized workers in Hollywood screenwriting, but these millions and millions of jobs that have just got nowhere near that degree of market power, nowhere near, I mean, the Amazon workers themselves, nowhere near that degree of impact. And I guess the thing you end up concluding is that while Dario Amadei's 50% might have been wrong, there is going to be people whose jobs are uplifted by technology and there is going to be people whose jobs are cast into shadow by technology and made a lot harder. And to some extent, market power will have an impact on that organization. It's to some extent why we need our governments to protect us or our governments to stand up to technology companies to help us here, I think. It's a sort of an interesting moment because looking down the road, you'd start saying, well, we need to think about what's the plan to tax these technology companies? Because if they're stealing such significant parts of the value created in the economy, then where does that leave the income tax system? Where does that leave the way that we fund most of what government does right now? It's an interesting existential challenge of the moment that I don't think many governments are even sort of debating. Yeah, and I think you're right that clearly there are some people who just do not have the level of market power or power from institutions like trade unions. And so for policymakers, I don't think that there is a sort of neat set of right levers you can pull to make sure that this goes well in every workplace. But I think that what does make sense for them to do is to try and think of what can policy do to give people more power. Now, there's like a couple of ways that you can think about power when it comes to changing your circumstances in the world of work. And economists sometimes talk about voice or exit. So voice is like your ability to speak up at work or to have a seat at the table. You know, one of the places I went to in the book was Sweden, where they have these very formal systems whereby every time something new changes in terms of technology at work, the workers and the employers have to sit down together at the same table, literally, and negotiate how it's going to go. So there are places in which you can try and strengthen people's right to have a voice. But if you can't do that, or in places where that's not likely, for example, like your outsourced security guards or gig economy workers, you know, there's lots of people where that's really difficult. You can also make it easier for people to exit, basically make it easier for people to walk away from bad work or from work that is becoming enshiftified because that's another way that you can exert power over employers to try and make work better. After the pandemic, there were huge labour shortages. And what happened was a lot of employers suddenly had to make their jobs better. They had to push up the wages. They had to offer more remote working. Even for like people like hourly shift workers, you started to see much better benefits, much better shift patterns on offer. And that was simply because they needed the staff. And so thinking about how do you make it easier for people to walk away and look for something better for themselves, you know, give people more agency in their lives in that way. And I think the best way to do that is to have a really good, strong safety net. You know, say that if you leave a job, you're not suddenly completely on the breadline, that you have some months in which your income is protected so that you have the time and the headspace to think about what's next. Sweden also has brought in this policy of like lifelong learning, whereby you can effectively go on furlough from your job for up to a year and get paid 80% of your pay while you train in something new. So there are ways that you can try and sort of strengthen people's ability to fight for themselves. And if I was a policymaker, that's probably the area that I would be looking in. You end the book saying that we need to have more faith in ourselves and be, I guess, as humans realize, wow, we're pretty accomplished at dealing with the nuance, the art, the craft of things. We need to have more faith. As we finish now, how do you think we should achieve that? How do you think in this moment right now, any of us should be confident that we've got a successful career ahead of us or a successful outcome here ahead of us? Well, I think as people start to encounter these new machines for real in their jobs, I think it dawns on a lot of people themselves that actually, oh, this isn't anywhere near as good as we've been told it is. Or yes, this is fine at some things, but it doesn't have my ability to kind of exert subtle human judgment over this. So I think that people are kind of realizing it for themselves. And I guess my advice would be to pay attention to what's happening in your own world rather than the kind of big headlines that keep coming at you. I also sort of hope that in a way that my book is a sort of a bit of a manifesto for what machines can't do. You know, ChatGPT can't, for instance, go down a mine and talk to the miners about how they feel about the fact that their jobs are changing. You know, Claude can't go and hang out with a community nurse and really understand what the relationship is between her and the people that she looks after. And so I think if we also just try and invest in the stuff that matters to us and remember that... Running a business means juggling a lot of moving parts, and when your communication tools can't keep up, things start to slip. Missed calls, slow replies, scattered conversations. They're not just frustrating, they're lost opportunities and revenue left on the table. That's where Quo comes in, spelled Q-U-O. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2, trusted by over 90,000 businesses. One shared business number for calls and texts, so every conversation stays visible, organized, and accountable. It works from an app or computer. You can keep your existing number, add teammates, and sync your CRM, letting you scale without adding complexity. And with built-in AI, Quo logs calls, summarizes conversations, and flags next steps, even after hours. Stop missing customers. Stop leaving revenue on the table. Try Quo free and get 20% off your first six months at quo.com slash tech. That's Q-U-O dot com slash tech. Quo. No missed calls. No missed customers. What makes a leader worth following? What should you really care about in your job as technology is changing so quickly? Is it just gonna be about machines talking to other machines? I mean, should you quit your job and start something on your own? What would that take? What does success and risk look like when we're all at the starting gate together? These are the questions we answer each week on Lead Human with Jack Myers and Tim Spengler. Join us each week and subscribe at your favorite podcast platform and You Again, that's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over four million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to Stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply. Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast, and your resident lover of all things Sanderson. And I'm Stephen, your bookish internet goofball, but you can call me the Smash Daddy. And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic, Mistborn. But here's the catch. Stephen here has not read Mistborn before. That's right, Hey Hey. So each week, you'll get my unfiltered, raw reactions to every single chapter. And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Stephen will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert, he'll be wrong. Newsflash, I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy Fan Fellas wherever you get your podcasts. Cozy traditions feel good, especially this time of year. And that includes your fall makeup look. 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