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

What I was hearing instead were stories about quite profound changes to the nature of people's jobs and how they felt about their jobs and whether they enjoyed their jobs or not.

And some of those were quite cautionary tales.

There were a lot of people who were saying, actually what's happening to me is almost the opposite.

of this idea that technology is going to give us space to be more human.

People were finding themselves sort of crunched into systems that were paced by machines, run by machines, in which judgment was being overtaken by machines, in which creativity was being sort of compressed or contained by machines.

And I thought, actually, if that's what's beginning to happen to people, then everyone should know about that.

And we should try and talk about why that's happening and whether there is a way to avoid that, because fundamentally, I don't think that's what anybody wants.

Yeah, I think they are still relevant.

I mean, Luddite is just now used as a sort of flippant term for somebody who's sort of reflexively anti-technology and just doesn't like any new tech.

But actually, the Luddites, they weren't really fighting against technology full stop.

They were fighting against the way in which technology

machines were being put to a new use, which was to cut them out of the equation.

These sort of knitting and wide-frame machines, they weren't displacing work entirely.

What they did was they allowed people who had no skill and no experience...

to make a less good quality product.

And in that sense, as we might come on to, it actually has an awful lot of similarities with some of the technologies that we're seeing today.

Even if they were lower quality, they were also a much lower price, and I think that was a deal that a lot of consumers were willing to make.

Yeah, so quite a lot has changed.

And actually, I think that article from 10 years ago and that sort of reporting that I've done, and just to clarify, the Jennifer unit isn't something that's used in Amazon warehouses, but it is used in some other warehouses, really informed the way I used to think about technology.

So yeah, I had met and interviewed a lot of people over the years who worked in jobs in which they were basically expected to work like robots.

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