FT Weekend Fest: How AI is really changing jobs

FT Tech Tonic

Murad Ahmed interviews FT journalist Sarah O'Connor about her new book, We Are Not Machines, which examines the real-world impact of AI on workplaces beyond futuristic predictions. They explore case studies ranging

Key takeaways

• Czech translator Peter faces reduced pay and creative fulfillment as agencies use machine translation post-editing to demand faster output at half the price.
• Swedish miners transitioned from underground driving to surface control rooms, using co-determination laws to negotiate privacy-preserving real-time tracking systems.

Main topics

• AI's impact on white-collar creative work
• Blue-collar automation and mining technology

Notable quotes

"I don't think it's about being pro-AI or anti-AI. I think it's about being pro-giving people control and power over it."

Conclusion

The episode provides a grounded, human-centric perspective on AI adoption,

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hello, I'm Murad Ahmed, the FT's technology news editor. Tectonic will be back soon with new episodes. But in the meantime, here's one of my highlights from the recent FT Weekend Festival, a conversation between me and my FT colleague, Sarah O'Connor, about her new book. It's called We Are Not Machines, and it covers a really big topic, the impact that AI is having on jobs. We had a really interesting chat, so here it is. Speaker 1 (0:28) Hello, my name is Murad Ahmed. I'm the technology news editor for the Financial Times, and I'm joined by Sarah O'Connor. Sarah's going to absolutely hate this bit, but I have to introduce her properly. She's an FT columnist, reporter, and associate editor. She has won every journalism prize worth winning, including the Orwell Prize and the Wincott Award. Quite simply, she's one of the best journalists of her generation. She's also the author... of this, her debut book, We Are Not Machines. It's the best book I've read on how AI is changing the world of work. So early in Sarah's book, you write that we hear a lot about what the tech titans of the world, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, say is going to happen to jobs and the job market. But your book... focuses on what is actually already happening. You do actual shoe leather reporting, you talk about getting your boots dirty. And that's the focus of this conversation here. We're going to talk, if you want predictions of the future and an oracle, that's not what we're going to do. We're going to talk about what's actually happening and it might just give you some insights as to what's going to happen next and maybe even be a bit of a call to arms about what you can do to affect the future. To Sarah. You split your book into three, mind, body and soul. And so let's start with mind. You start with the translation industry and you start with a Czech translator, Peter. Do you want to explain why you start there, who Peter is and what is going on in that particular industry? Speaker 3 (2:08) Yeah, I mean, as you say, Murat, and thank you for that introduction. The reason I wrote this book... really is that I'm like a shoe leather reporter at heart. What I like to do is to get out of the office, to get away from the kind of the C-suite interviews and just go and talk to people about what's really happening in the world and what that can tell us about how things are changing. And I felt that that was really sort of lacking in this whole debate about AI. It was so dominated, I felt, by... These big picture predictions, you know, some of them very utopian. We're all going to end up working three hours a day and lying in our hammocks and reading poetry to each other. Or the kind of the really dystopian ones, you know, Bill Gates is the latest, that all jobs are going to be wiped out and we're going to have to, you know, think of some sort of completely new way of organising society. And it was kind of frustrating to me for a couple of reasons. One is that, you know, these... voices are all really coming from the top. They're coming from people often who actually have something to sell us, not that I think they're doing a brilliant job always on their PR, but they have a kind of vested interest, and yet they're really dominating how we're trying to think about the economic impacts of this technology. And also because... As you say, I know because I write about the world of work that this technology has already entered all of our lives. It's entered all of our workplaces. It has already started to transform things. And while we were spending all of our time talking about predictions over how many jobs will be lost, all of the kind of obsession about the quantity of jobs, I was already starting to hear that actually... the quality of jobs is starting to change. You know, the nature of work, the way we feel about our work, whether it gives us satisfaction and if so, how. You know, all of that was starting to change, I thought, in quite interesting ways. And so I really wanted to write a book that kind of, yeah, as you say, writes about what's actually happening and gives voice to people who maybe don't always get heard in this debate. I started with translators because, you know, they are very clearly on the front lines of this. transition, they felt it first. And my sort of assumption had been, well, surely a lot of translators have simply lost their jobs now, because we all know that artificial intelligence and, you know, previous iterations of machine translation are pretty good. But that's actually not really what's happened. I mean, there has been a kind of decreasing demand for translators over the years. But a lot of translators do things that fundamentally the machines aren't quite good enough yet to do. And so that leaves the question of, well, how are their jobs changing and is it for the better or is it for the worse? So Peto, who you talked about, so he translates subtitles. He lives in the Czech Republic. He translates the subtitles of like Netflix shows, Disney shows. He absolutely loves this job. He says it's his dream job because you get to watch a lot of TV. He loves TV. But also it's like, it's a very creative. job in ways that I hadn't really thought about. So yeah, Petter was telling me all kinds of things, kinds of decisions that he has to make, judgment calls. So one would be, you know, in Czech, there are two different ways of saying you. There's like the formal you and the informal you is true of lots of European languages. But obviously, in English, we just say you. So if you're translating like an American show, you're the one who has to decide in any given scene, well, what tense would they be speaking in here? How familiar are they with each other? Are they friends? Are they colleagues? Sometimes that might change at some point in the course of an episode or a season. And that's a kind of human judgment that you have to make. You know, the other thing is jokes. So like jokes are incredibly difficult to translate, as you might imagine. A lot of jokes are like play on sort of shared cultural knowledge in a particular country or their wordplay, you know. And so They're really hard to do, but they're really enjoyable when you kind of nail it. And that's what he said to me, is there's this profound sense of satisfaction when you figure out some way of translating a joke that plays well, like on the East Coast of America, in a way that's still funny, you know, in the Czech Republic. My favourite example, actually, of the genius of translators is the Asterix books. Obviously they're written in French, but some of the English translators are just amazing. So yeah, one of my favorite examples is Obelix's dog, who in the French he's called i-de-fix, which means obsession. But the English translators called him Dogmatix, which if anything is an even better joke. So it just goes to show how creative this job is. So what's happened to Petter? How has AI changed the job for people like him? What's happened is that a lot of people who do that are freelancers, and agencies will kind of intermediate this work between the studios and the freelance translators. The agencies have brought in something new called machine translation post-editing. And what that means is that the agencies will take the subtitles in English. they will get a machine to translate them, and then they will give that machine copy to the professional translator, who's now told to tidy it up, to check it for accuracy, maybe make it sound a bit more human. But they're asked to do this at twice the pace and for half the price. And so what happens is a job that... used to be quite fulfilling and creative has become more intense. You know, he feels like he has to rush through this work now because he has to still make his kind of his weekly or his monthly income, but you have to rattle through it faster. But not only that, he said that it actually loses the creative part of it. And he said that, you know, when someone sort of presents a solution to you and you're looking at that, it's very hard then to kind of think of your own solution. Like it's already sort of set the... frame of reference for you. Plus, you're in a hurry, right? And so basically what he said was a job that used to be really profoundly satisfying and creative had become more repetitive, more mechanical. You know, he started out working a production line in like a window and doors factory. He was a manual labourer to begin with. And he said it felt a bit more like that kind of job. And the reason I started my book with that example, although it's a bit depressing, is that I think it's really important because it This is not at all what we were promised this technology would do, right? We were told that this technology would allow us to become more human, that we could offload the repetitive stuff, the mechanical stuff, the stuff that's dull or dirty or dangerous, and that we would be freed up to concentrate more on the parts of our jobs that