A few years ago, when ChatGPT and Claude were beginning to take off, some tech leaders seemed to develop a curious interest in oceanography. Consider, for instance, the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s suggestion in 2023 that AI ought to be compared to a ‘tidal wave’; or Mustafa Suleyman’s book on AI, The Coming Wave (2024), in which the DeepMind co-founder talks urgently about an ‘impending deluge’ (while repeatedly warning us that the ‘wave is coming’, and, even more alarmingly, ‘the coming wave really is coming’).
It didn’t take long for the analogy to spread. The IMF’s Kristalina Georgieva would liken the technology to a ‘tsunami hitting the labour market’. Not only do these watery and somewhat gloomy metaphors imply that technological change is natural and inevitable; they also suggest that the displacement caused by such change can only be prepared for and then mopped up afterwards (though preferably not by the companies who poured billions into building the wave machines).
‘We think we’re robotising our work, but what if we’re actually robotising ourselves?’
Sarah O’Connor’s We Are Not Machines is a powerful and refreshing riposte to this sort of fatalistic thinking. Rather than making sweeping predictions about how technology will change the future of work, O’Connor chooses, in her own words, to ‘get [her] shoes dirty’ and interview those whose jobs look to be most exposed to technological change. As a former self-proclaimed ‘techno-optimist’, who once believed that certain forms of labour should be automated away, she now understands the current situation – in which AI and robots are actually threatening to do this – to be a little bit more nuanced and complex than she’d suggested in her column for the Financial Times a decade ago.
