The book title We Are Not Machines gave me the impression that it’s about workers’ anxiety about being replaced by artificial intelligence. Turns out, this book by Financial Times reporter Sarah O’Connor was way more than that.
This is a book I would recommend to everyone as it provides an insightful analysis on why and how AI is not necessarily bad news for workers.
Technology is turning workers into machines
AI will replace workers in some of the jobs. The question is how many and what jobs will be replaced. But we always hear technology optimists say that technology will help take care of the most undesirable part of their work.
So, even if technology is indeed replacing humans in the jobs market, it could be beneficial to the workers. We, the working class, can move on to take jobs that are more meaningful and less mundane. There is a path to utopia in this.
Taylorism is the problem
But as Sarah pointed out in the book, one major counterargument was the idea of Taylorism. This concept is named after Frederick Winslow Taylor, a mechanical engineer who was born in 1856 and created a modern system of industrial efficiency. The core of Taylor’s method was to use rules to replace “the judgement of the individual workman.” Employees are told “not only what is to be done but how it is to be done and the exact time to be allowed for doing it.”
While Taylorism indeed provided a manual to boost production efficiency, a consequence is that workers were dehumanized. They became part of the machines. Their individual thinking, creativity and even their own knowledge had become much less important to the company. Workers are encouraged to follow the script and become part of the system and only work within the confines of the system.
In the book, Sarah discussed a lot about Amazon warehouse workers’ working conditions, with good reason. Modern day Amazon warehouses are the extreme embodiment of Taylorism.
The book, through interviews with workers and former workers in their warehouses illustrates the predicament they face in their job. In the name of efficiency, their jobs are mostly repeated, small tasks. And with better automation technology and now AI, the robots can perform an increasing share of the work.
Under the human in the loop model, human workers are left with not the most “creative” and “mind-freeing” tasks. Rather, they have to take care of tasks that robots and AI cannot perform cost-efficiently, repeatedly and at an even higher frequency, because they have to keep up with the speed at which robots work.
They are racing the robots daily, but not as a human, but as a machine.
Are there hopes? Can we be human at work?
Under Taylorism, the motivation for de-humanizing workers is to make them highly replaceable, by other humans before and potentially by robots in the not so near future.
So, I work, therefore I am not?
Sarah believes a future in which workers are being respected is possible. The path is for employers to start trusting their employees can keep their souls when performing their tasks.
She provided several examples and the one that impacted me most was the Dutch nursing company. It is a story about several nurses who formed an organization to provide nursing service in a different way—an un-machine way. They realized that the standard nursing job arrangement— where managers tell the nurses when and what to do for the patients—actually provides subpar care to the patients.
What they offer is a more autonomous style: each team of nurses would take care of everything relating to the clients so that they would really know who the patients are, what they need and how best to take care of them. This is an excellent example of how sometimes arranging tasks with an aim to achieve a higher degree of management control can sometimes lower the quality of care.
The key to the AI problem is then a question of how far we can free ourselves from this corporate control mindset and really think hard about how to let workers be human and be themselves. Then we may have a chance for AI to be a tool that helps liberate workers, instead of replacing them.
To me, We Are Not Machines is a master class in journalism. Sarah asked a very insightful question. The book is full of in depth, on-the-ground interviews with real life workers affected, listening about how they feel about their life, their job and their feeling about the future. This book led me to rethink the “AI replacing labor” question and reconsider what work is.
The book is also full of human touches: It lets readers see the AI predicament through Sarah’s eyes and her connections with the workers. This book makes me worry about the future, feel curious about what the alternatives are, and leaves me with a hopeful inspiration.
Amazon Associated Link: We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work
