We Are Not Machines by Sarah O’Connor review – can dignity at work survive the tech revolution?

Sarah O’Connor’s new book We Are Not Machines examines the collision of artificial intelligence, automation, and human labour, arguing that the fight for dignity at work is being reshaped by technologies that often reintroduce old battles in new forms [1]. The book’s title is drawn from signs carried by striking Swedish miners in 1969 that read “Vi är ej maskiner” — “We are not machines” — as they protested new methods of monitoring their output [1]. O’Connor, a Financial Times reporter for nearly two decades, traces how the principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who died more than a century ago, still influence modern workplaces through “Taylorism,” the subdivision of production into measurable, optimisable components [1]. O’Connor visits the EMA4 Amazon Warehouse in Sutton Coldfield, where robots and humans work side by side picking and stowing items [1]. Those operations are supported by remote workers in Costa Rica and India who monitor video feeds of Amazon shelves, auditing AI camera systems that track item placement [1]. They work nine-hour shifts, screening up to 8,000 videos a week [1]. Costa Rica, a high-income economy and the only OECD member in Central America, has diversified from agriculture into corporate services, medical manufacturing, and IT, with services now generating 75.9 percent of GDP [6][7]. The book highlights how seemingly neutral technological tools can carry powerful assumptions into the marketplace [1]. O’Connor writes that if a machine’s work is “a little bit worse than a human’s, but an awful lot cheaper and faster, that might be a trade some employers, clients, and customers are willing to make” [1]. The most hopeful examples in the book involve workers taking control of their own terms: the Writers Guild of America screenwriters who strike to set rules for AI use in scripts, and Dutch care workers who establish their own practice to tailor care to individual patients without strict time constraints [1]. O’Connor closes with a warning: “The goal might be to make machines in our image, but what I fear is that – perhaps without even quite noticing – we remake ourselves in theirs” [1]. The book argues these questions remain unsettled and the future of work is still open to human intervention [1].