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

I used to think...

well, you know, bring on the damn robots then, you know, like let's get real robots in to do these jobs.

Like this is a waste of kind of human potential.

And this is a great example of where automation would be brilliant.

And so I used to be quite a techno optimist in the sense that I thought there were huge numbers of roles that actually could and should be automated.

So what's happened now in Amazon warehouses, at least in the one that I went to visit is

is that the robots have arrived, but not really in the way that I had imagined.

So I'd basically imagined like a one-for-one swap, right?

So instead of a person walking around, you'd have like a kind of humanoid robot doing it.

Tapping away at your laptop.

No, exactly.

And it's not how it works in Amazon either.

So I went to visit a new...

Amazon Warehouse, which has their sort of latest automation technology.

And the way it works now is that rather than you as a worker walking around for like maybe 10 miles a day, just weaving between all of these

shelves and picking things off now on each floor there's a big fence and around the perimeter of that fence the workers stand stationary in one place and inside the fence are the robots but the robots are basically like giant Roombas and what they do is they drive around inside this perimeter fence and they pick up the shelves and they bring the shelves to the workers

And so you now as a worker, you stand in one place and a robot brings you a shelf and then a light illuminates which part of the shelf you need to look at.

And a screen gives you a picture of what the thing is you need to pick off.

And I tried this out.

I think I had to pick off like a mobile phone case with a dolphin on it.

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