What chance do we have versus the machines?
Eat Sleep Work Repeat - better workplace culture
Bruce Daisley
4.7 • 968 Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sarah O'Connor is a journalist for the Financial Times who specialises in writing about work and the evolution of our jobs. Over the last year or so that has meant a lot of reflection about AI job displacement.
In her new book, We Are Not Machines, Sarah reflects on how technological change is reshaping the workplace - and the invisible enshittification it often brings with it. Sarah has a strong message: firstly that we should have more belief in the unique strengths of human labour, and secondly that individual agency is the most important differentiator in our favour.
It's a brilliant conversation that gives a flavour of her book.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is it, Sleep Worker, Pete. It's a podcast about workplace culture. Hello, I'm Bruce Daisley. |
| 0:07.7 | Now, will the computers steal our jobs? Will AI supplant us? It's the discussion that everyone keeps coming back to right now. |
| 0:17.0 | I especially enjoy seeing it played out at grand scale, the site of seeing Google's |
| 0:23.7 | billionaire, former chief exec, Eric Schmidt getting booed as he tried to sell the wonders of |
| 0:29.7 | AI to scared class of 2026, was a moment of brief comic relief. But obviously, this is a genuine concern for a lot of people. |
| 0:41.3 | Where are we going to be in five, ten years? |
| 0:43.8 | How does it affect us, our ability to pay for our lives? |
| 0:48.0 | How is it going to impact the future that we've got ahead of us? |
| 0:52.9 | There's a lot of people, of course, who say that the |
| 0:55.4 | idea that half of all jobs will be replaced is nothing more than fuel to stimulate investors |
| 1:02.8 | created by the bosses of these AI firms to try and suggest that somehow they are deserving of |
| 1:10.6 | these vast amounts of investment that are going |
| 1:12.8 | into them right now. There's one belief that suggests that actually far from half of all jobs |
| 1:18.4 | being automated, that typically technology as it improves creates more demand and certainly |
| 1:25.6 | that's been the case in the past. Other people say that the further |
| 1:28.2 | you are away from a job, the easier you believe it can be automated. A truck driver looks very |
| 1:33.7 | easy to automate when you're viewing it as a sell on a spreadsheet. But up close, you realize |
| 1:38.9 | it involves a lot of details like navigating tight city centres or speaking to people or adjusting plans based on what's going on. |
| 1:47.4 | It's not as easy to automate when you get up close. In the context of all of that comes a new |
| 1:53.0 | book by Sarah O'Connor. Now Sarah, you've possibly read plenty of her stuff. She's a writer for |
| 1:58.8 | the Financial Times. She's written about work for the FT for certainly a long time. She's a writer for the Financial Times. She's written about work for the FT for |
| 2:02.7 | certainly a long time. She's, I think she told me that she joined as a trainee. So she's been there |
... |
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