Sarah O'Connor

speaker

261 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Jul

Sarah O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford · LIVE: We Are Not Machines - with Sarah O'Connor · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

Hello, Tim.

Thank you for having me.

No.

It's a point of principle.

Yes, so you might have noticed that my name bears a faint resemblance to the heroine of the Terminator films.

Growing up, occasionally people made Terminator jokes to me, and as a result, I never watched them on principle because it annoyed me.

And so about a decade ago, I went accidentally sort of globally viral when I very simply tweeted a news story that I'd seen come out, which was that a robot had killed a worker in a Volkswagen factory and didn't realize that this would cause the Internet to break.

So, yeah, so people just found it very hilarious that someone called Sarah O'Connor had written about robots.

And for about a decade, people have occasionally sent me, you know, Terminator GIFs, posters of the Terminator films with my face photoshopped in.

And as a result, no, I have not watched those films.

I think what I'm trying to say in the book is that we're all sort of drowning in information predictions about AI and what it might do to the world of work.

And a lot of those are coming from either economists or the big tech executives who have created large language models and are marketing them.

you know the tech guys have something to sell right and so they have their own motivations and then you know economists I think are trying their best to figure out what's going on but the the way in which they're doing that I think is very feels very abstract to me as someone you know I'm a reporter at heart so my favorite thing to do is to like get my notebook put my boots on and like

go and meet people and stand outside the factory gates and talk to people about what's actually happening and so over the past few years I've just felt very frustrated that everything that I'm hearing about this is coming from people who are either looking at spreadsheets and models or who have a product to sell and I just wanted to hear less about what these men say is going to happen and more about what's already actually happening from the people that it's actually happening to so in the book I basically went to find people and places and workplaces and

that are on the front lines of what's already happening.

So people who are,

encountering autonomous robots in their workplaces or are working with or for or around large luggage models and they're starting to change the way they work.

And when I did that, what I realised was that I wasn't really hearing this very utopian story that this is liberating me, this is freeing me from dull, dirty, dangerous work and making everything fantastic.

But nor was I really hearing a lot of stories that were like,

my job has been completely wiped out.

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