Man Versus Machine | Newcity Lit

A voracious appetite for orchids exploded in the nineteenth century. In the Victorian age of colonization, elites fetishized this beautiful flower and, of course, plundered natural habits to ensnare this prized status symbol. It was an era of reconnaissance and land-surveillance to capture orchids ultimately for the profit of the bourgeois. What does this have to do with artificial intelligence, you may be wondering?

This reference springs from Sarah O’Connor’s “We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work.” An orchid from the nineteenth century and ChatGPT are seemingly incongruous. Yet for Raul, one of the many workers afflicted by the pains of AI that author Sarah O’Connor interviews, the orchid is his only saving grace. Raul is in Amazon’s GO-AI workplace the “human-in-the-loop,” monitoring the company’s robots for inaccuracies. He is a surveyor of mistakes, for the ultimate goal of perfecting the machine. It is tedious and most of all boring. It is an implementation wide-ranging in the company in the past decade for “takt time.” For this, he is gruelingly monitoring—and being monitored himself—the amount of minutes it takes to complete a task in the margins of profit. This job contrasts with his love for the orchid: “[orchid growing] was very insightful. It’s a very slow-growing plant, so you need a lot of patience, but it’s a beautiful result,” he says to O’Connor.

The author, a prolific columnist for the Financial Times, deep-dives into the lives of translators, truck drivers, miners, Amazon warehouse workers, academics and many other people and places colonized by the rise of LLMs, machine learning and generative AI. She swashbuckles across these diverse workplaces in three sections of her book: body, mind and soul. Her original refrain (which I find astutely honest) is that she first viewed AI as being able to liberate workers from the slog of menial labor—liberated for creativity, in a way. Yet at the onset of this book, she cringes at this ideal. This is not what was happening. In “We Are Not Machines” O’Connor shows us these tribulations, and investigates how workers overseeing robots are now becoming the robots themselves.

O’Connor finds people are distinctly lacking autonomy in the wake of the AI tsunami. Often billed as an inevitability by CEOs and profiteers of the industry, AI can be viewed as an inevitable, unstoppable force of nature that workers must reckon with. Yet, O’Connor argues, the same people saying it is inevitable are the ones making it so. The book gets this refrain out of the way: charting specifically what it means to be human in this rapidly morphing workplace. What it means to be human, it turns out, is being able to have control over your own working conditions.

The vast range of industries investigated in this book, and O’Connor’s narrative prowess in connecting them for the reader, are the palpitating pulses of the pages. It’s a lack of power throughout them all that stands out: the workplace overseers don’t even ask what the workers need to, say, improve their own productivity. Instead, it’s a trickle-down economics of quantity and speed over quality of work. Interweaved, O’Connor remarks on the similarities to past labor movements that still have not been solved. This hammers it in. Workers’ rights are an ancient battle.

With all this in mind—and the general hoopla of the dystopia we are currently inhabiting—O’Connor makes a concerted effort to not only focus on chagrin and pain. For instance, she provides evidence of miners feeling much safer in their hazardous workspace with the arrival of autonomous trucks for the dangerous passageways of the mines. Yet, the union powerfully fought for this balance in the workplace: the miners did not want to be taken away from being a blue-collar worker (due to the union), and didn’t want to just sit in a control room monitoring a robot like Raul at Amazon. So, they found an equilibrium with the technology.

“We Are Not Machines” is a search for that equilibrium. Unfortunately, the bad outweighs the good in O’Connor’s investigations. AI, she says, is the long-awaited arrival of all of our labor-movement ancestors’ worst fears. It’s not only cracking the workplace and showing that maybe flaws were already here, but that AI is the final schism. While the book ends with a more moral-focused call-to-action of hope, the strength in the book is in the evidence and not in the conclusion.

While the book isn’t lacking per-se, I find myself longing for a different investigation now. I want to take the fever of AI and the fetishization of technological progress at the expense of the proletariat and ask a philosopher. O’Connor is neither philosopher nor prophet, and doesn’t need to be. The conclusion, albeit preachy, leaves me longing for a more ethical puncturing of AI. I don’t want it hinted at ambiguously in a campaign, I want it answered.

“We Are Not Machines: The Fight For the Future of Work”
By Sarah O’Connor
Penguin Books, 256 pages