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 · last 12 months

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

doing that, whether it's like, oh, now I don't have to take any minutes for this meeting or now I don't have to spend two hours Googling three relevant research articles.

But I do think it's also, it's very easy to start also using it for things that maybe in the past we would have put a bit of human care and attention into.

Like, you know, I think a lot of people are using ChatGPT now to write wedding speeches or speeches at funerals and that sort of thing, which, you know, you might once have thought were among the more human tasks that we did.

I'm a lot more hopeful now than I was when I started writing the book, actually.

And I think that's probably because of the people that I met along the way.

So like another of these sort of metaphors or like cliches that we often hear is, you know, people will say, well, you know, inevitably there's going to be winners and losers.

You know, there's there's dangers and opportunities.

And that sort of invites us to think like, OK, well, I better just wait and find out if I'm going to be a winner or a loser.

And like, you know, fingers crossed.

I'll be a winner.

But you just kind of got your lottery ticket and then you wait and see.

But like, that's not actually what people are doing.

Like people actually are maneuvering themselves and trying to figure out what they can do to make sure that things work out well for them.

Like everyone is shaping and determining this.

So in that sense, I ended up more optimistic because I think that we have a lot more agency to figure out how this goes and to make sure it goes in a way that we want than we're sometimes led to believe.

I think it remains to be seen.

I think that METR study was really interesting because what it sort of highlights to me is that, you know, we were talking about this distinction between tasks and jobs and that actually your whole job might disappear, but some tasks within it might change.

But when you think about something at the level of an entire organisation, you've also got to think about jobs and systems.

And so, you know, a computer programmer...

on his or her own, might have become much more productive if they can use a coding AI system.

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