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

It's the stockings again, exactly.

Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of the things that I realised working on the book is that, you know, economists, when they're sort of doing their modelling about which jobs might be displaced or degraded or changed by technology, they look at, like, how good is the technology and compare that to how good is the human.

But actually, like, can a robot do my job as well as me is not always a particularly useful question, like...

Can someone persuade my boss that a robot can do my job as well as me is a more relevant question.

Or would my customers or consumers be content to have someone do my job less well than me, but for a much cheaper price?

I think it's to do with both.

But I think you make a good point, which is that often this question about what will AI do to the world of work is seen as a technical question.

But it's not just a question of the technical side.

It's also a question of consumer choice and institutions and culture and bargaining power and economic power.

So, yeah, I mean, partly...

The reason it's been very disruptive to translators is that the translating is like basically all they do, like that one task of like translating something.

If you're a freelance translator, that is pretty much your whole job.

Whereas for a journalist, writing an article is like actually quite a small part of my job.

My job also involves doing a lot of reading, going out to interview people.

doing stuff like this and so it's more it's more disruptive in some particular professions depending on like how much of your tasks are automatable and then also yeah like your your your market power right if you're if you're a freelancer then that's a very different thing to being a well-protected miner in a in a unionized mine company in sweden and can we talk about coders because superficially uh programmers software coders

Most of the ones I interviewed do not feel like that.

I think coding is an example of a job that in many ways actually has probably been enriched and made more fun and more productive by this new technology.

And I think the reason that it is playing out different is partly, you know, this thing about bargaining power and where you sit in the sort of economic chain.

But also, if you're a computer programmer, like you're what you really care about and love is not literally sitting there and writing out.

lines of code.

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