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 you love doing is like solving problems.

And so what the tools do, they might automate some of the kind of the actual literal coding, but they're not automating that kind of really fun, creative problem solving bit.

It just allows you to like try things out or do stuff faster.

And this is why they're so enthusiastic and think it's brilliant, because for their jobs, it is pretty brilliant.

Yeah, so I think one of the things that I've realized and I now really flinch when I hear it and I flinch when I think that I've probably said it sometimes as well in the past is that I think we're really using some of the wrong metaphors when we talk about this.

So I don't know if you've noticed this, but I find that like technology executives in particular, but also sometimes economists will talk about like there's a tsunami of change coming or there is a new wave of technological change

I think it's misleading because it makes it sound like it's akin to a natural phenomenon.

Like it's something that's just happening that just came out of nowhere and it's going to happen to us.

And it invites us to think that at best, all we can do is A, prepare for it and B,

Get ready to mop up after it.

And, you know, these metaphors, I think, are really useful to technology executives in their conversations with policymakers, because, you know, nobody wants to look like the fool who thinks you can hold back the tide.

Right.

And so it invites you to think of this as something that is happening anyway.

And, you know, that there's very little that you can fundamentally do about it.

But that's not true at all.

That's never been true.

Technology is stuff that is made by people and implemented by people.

And there is a huge variety, as we've just discussed, in the ways in which it can play out in different occupations and in different countries and in different parts of the labour market.

And a lot of that is dictated by

the choices that people make and the things they choose to value.

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