Sarah O’Connor’s We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work accompanied me on my summer holiday, but it has continued to unsettle how I think about work. It is an engaging, accessible book, and precisely the kind that prompts a recalibration of what you want your own work to be about. In the age of AI, it offers a useful lens for deciding what we should automate, what we should protect, and who gets to make those choices.
I am not anti-AI; I am pro-human. I routinely use AI tools, my research involves designing hardware for AI, and I welcome their use where they genuinely enhance life. The difficult questions are which parts of life they enhance, who gets to decide, and what exactly we mean by “enhancement”.
O’Connor examines the intersection of work and technology through our collective struggle to preserve some of our most cherished human traits: “to pass skill and knowledge from one generation to the next; to create, and to delight one another with our creations; to care for each other when we are too weak to care for ourselves”. The book is structured into three sections: “Mind”, “Body”, and “Soul”, which explore autonomy in cognitive work, safety in physical labour, and the intrinsic value of skill, creation, and care. Moving across warehouses, mines, care homes, and creative studios, O’Connor repeatedly returns to three questions: who shapes technology and its adoption, under what incentives, and in whose interests?
For me, the book’s deeper lesson is that these choices are rarely individual. What workers can protect depends on whether they have any collective power over how technology is introduced. The title itself comes from the 1969-70 strike by miners at the Swedish state-owned company LKAB. Their rallying cry was Vi är ej maskiner: we are not machines. Tellingly, the book’s most hopeful narratives are those in which people act collectively to reclaim agency over how their work is organised.
Craft and “Vibe Knitters”
A concept that particularly resonated with me is O’Connor’s use of Karri Saarinen’s account of craft: “the deliberate attention put into making something excellent, not because someone is checking, but because it matters to the maker”. O’Connor also cites Saarinen’s wider economic point that when something becomes cheaper to build, the default outcome is often simply to build more of it, making us less critical of what actually deserves to exist. I recognise this tension from my own vibe coding. The speed and ease are exhilarating, yet they risk detaching the act of production from the rigorous exercise of judgement.
O’Connor restores the historical context around the stockingers who became Luddites. Far from being ignorant reactionaries smashing unfamiliar machines, they were highly skilled framework knitters reacting against particular uses of machinery that degraded both their trade and its products. She refers to the employment of unapprenticed “colts” to turn out cheap goods as “vibe knitters” of their day. The historical question, then as now, is about the social relations in which machines are deployed, the kinds of work they enable, and the products they are used to create.
This discussion connects to a much older debate about the division of labour. O’Connor cites Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose The Principles of Scientific Management sought to convert workers’ accumulated craft knowledge into “rules, laws, and formulae” held and applied by management, displacing individual judgement. Against this, she places John Ruskin’s 1853 warning in “The Nature of Gothic”: it is not merely labour that is divided, but people themselves, broken into “fragments and crumbs of life”.
Karl Marx’s theory of alienation has much to add to this discussion. In the 1844 manuscripts, Marx describes four connected dimensions of alienation: the worker is estranged from the product, from the activity of labour, from other people, and from the human capacity for free, conscious creation. His observation that the worker’s activity “belongs to another” and is “a loss of his self” is therefore not simply a claim about who owns the product. It highlights the worker’s estrangement from their own activity – work experienced as external, compelled, and no longer self-directed. By 1848, Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that the worker “becomes an appendage of the machine”.
Each of these thinkers helps illuminate what changes when workers are separated from meaningful responsibility for both their labour and its result. Specialisation enables production on a scale impossible for a solo craftsperson. But those gains ring hollow when work is so fractured that nobody can see, or care about, the whole. Something human is extracted from the process, even as measurable output soars. Unless, perhaps, there is collective and living control over the entire enterprise.
What Should We Automate?
O’Connor quotes an interviewee who poses a striking question: why are we so eager to automate the cognitive activities our minds excel at, and which nourish our minds, rather than the physical tasks our bodies struggle with and which cause physical damage? This question stayed with me throughout the holiday.
Expanding on this, she cites Andreas Schleicher on generative AI in education. A system can effortlessly throw an answer back at us without revealing its provenance or how it was constructed. I recently experienced my own somewhat jarring version of this. I found myself spending more time investigating the intellectual lineage of a mathematical proof generated by GPT-5.5 than I spent proving the theorem from scratch in Lean. It inverted my sense of what takes time in research. Producing the formal mathematical object was almost instantaneous; establishing its origins, understanding its mechanics, and deciding whether I actually thought it illuminating remained stubbornly slow.
This is not necessarily a negative development, but it shifts where the craft lies. Unless we notice that shift, we risk mistaking possession of an answer for understanding.
Seeing the Whole Person
Perhaps the book’s most compelling case study is the Dutch home-care organisation Buurtzorg. Its model relies on small, self-managing teams of nurses who take holistic responsibility for the entire care process. A highly trained nurse might administer complex medication, dress a wound, and then make the patient a sandwich. Viewed through a strictly Taylorist lens, making a sandwich is a gross misallocation of expensive skill and ought to be delegated to cheaper labour. Viewed as part of human care, however, it becomes an opportunity to observe how that person is living and assess their broader needs. The simple task is inseparable from the skilled one.
The same pattern extends beyond nursing. I see it in the creeping deskilling of teaching in England, where the educator’s role is increasingly carved into separately managed tasks. An Ofsted study of teacher wellbeing found that limited influence over policy – teachers feeling “done to” rather than “worked with” – contributed to a sense of de-professionalisation. The same logic shapes the ticketing systems through which large institutions, including my own, manage HR and ICT support. It also shapes higher education, where interactions with staff and students are increasingly packaged, routed, and siloed. In each case, relationships that depend on continuity and judgement are divided into discrete, measurable transactions.
Specialists matter, and a functioning ticketing system is preferable to chaos. Yet any honest accounting of efficiency must include the hidden cost of nobody seeing the person – or the problem – as a whole. It must also account for what workers lose when their roles become too narrow for them to exercise judgement or care about the outcome – and, centrally, when they cannot reach beyond those roles through collective control of the production process as a whole.
Who Is the “We”?
O’Connor skewers what she describes as a cliché that technologies are “only tools” and that what matters is how we choose to use them. Her counter-question is simple: who exactly belongs to the “we” making those choices?
It is striking that almost all the battles for human-centred work detailed in the book are collective ones, even when their victories are ultimately codified as individual rights. The Swedish miners did not optimise their relationship with machinery through individual negotiation. More recently, during its 148-day strike, the Writers Guild of America won rules in the 2023 agreement governing AI: AI could not write or rewrite literary material under the agreement; AI-generated material was not source material; and writers could not be required to use AI. These were foundational choices about technology, won through organised labour.
Because such victories are codified as rights exercised by individuals, their collective origins are easy to forget. Nicos Poulantzas is useful here. In State, Power, Socialism, he treats the state as a material condensation of the balance of forces among classes and class fractions. This offers one way of seeing how rights that appear to belong to isolated individuals can bear the imprint of collective struggle. The right may be granted and exercised individually; the power that made it possible was collective.
The “we” defining technological choice must include those actually performing the work. For people divorced from the ownership and control of the technology, exhortations to preserve their craft are nearly useless if they control neither the tools nor the targets and metrics by which their work is judged.
More Than Machines
The final chapters include perhaps the book’s most unsettling idea: that what some call artificial general intelligence (AGI) might arrive not because machines advance, but because humans retreat from what we are capable of when faced with apparently superior machine performance. Organisations may treat us as machines, but we may also come to understand ourselves as defective machines, slow and inconsistent approximations of systems whose strengths we have adopted as the gold standard.
I closed the book wanting to identify – and ruthlessly prioritise – the crafts I most enjoy, at work and beyond. I remain eager to use AI to automate genuine human drudgery. Yet the current temptation is to automate whatever is easiest to automate, rather than what we actually wish to relinquish, on the vague promise that doing so will free us up for… what exactly?
Much of life’s joy resides in craft. Those of us fortunate enough to retain some autonomy over our work and lives should think carefully before surrendering it. O’Connor’s narratives show that preserving human craft requires both individual choice and collective action. Remaining more than machines is not merely a personal preference, it is a collective and deeply political task.
Sources and further reading
Quotations not otherwise linked are drawn from Sarah O’Connor’s We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work.
People
- Sarah O’Connor – Financial Times profile
- Karri Saarinen – Linear profile
- Frederick Winslow Taylor – biography
- John Ruskin – biography
- Karl Marx – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Friedrich Engels – biography
- Andreas Schleicher – biography
- Nicos Poulantzas – biography
Primary texts
- Sarah O’Connor, We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work
- Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management
- John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic”, in The Stones of Venice, Volume II
- Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour”, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Chapter I
- Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism
- Writers Guild of America, summary of the 2023 Minimum Basic Agreement
Broader context
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Karl Marx”: alienation and human flourishing
- The Guardian review, including the origin of the book’s title
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Luddite”
- The 2023 Writers Guild of America strike
- Buurtzorg’s model of care
- Ofsted, Teacher well-being at work in schools and further education providers
- Lean theorem prover
AI tools were used to support copy-editing and to help collect and organise the links above.
George A. Constantinides 