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Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello, my name's David Ranssenman and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today, as part of our series that we call Where Are We Going about some of the big questions facing all of us?

I'm talking to the writer and journalist Sarah O'Connor about the past,

present and future of work. Sarah writes for the Financial Times. She's an award-winning journalist

who has been looking at the changing character of work for nearly 20 years, and she's the author of a

really interesting new book called We Are Not Machines. We are talking in part about

AI. We are talking about the coming of a new machine age. But this is also a conversation about what work

means, why people do it, what they value in the world of work, and whether the changes that are coming are going to destroy

the things that we value.

Sarah, at the risk of starting with a question that is both unanswerable and a bit pretentious,

I want to ask you what work is, because it is one of

those words that just covers everything, right? So we use it to mean chores and tasks, and we use it to

mean careers and vocations, a sort of spiritual calling. You've written about the world of work

for a long time in lots of different contexts.

So when you picture the world of work, what do you think of? Are we basically talking about

jobs? I think these days and in the context of my work, which is to write about what we now

describe as labour markets. And a long time ago, we would never have dreamed of describing

...