Elon Musk and co may relish march of the robots but there must be AI boundaries in the workplace | Heather Stewart

As technology advances quickly, firms should not lose sight of what qualities humans bring to jobs A robot magician called D4YRL was rejected as a member of the Magic Circle last week, for being insufficiently human. While D4YRL’s tricks were exemplary, the august organisation decided “he” did not engage the audience’s emotions as a flesh-and-blood performer would. With robotics and AI now advancing at breakneck speed, it was the latest example of an organisation forced to confront questions that were once the province of philosophy – such as what it means to be human. In her enjoyable new book, We Are Not Machines, the FT journalist Sarah O’Connor takes a long, hard look at one pressing aspect of this problem: how AI is changing our jobs and perhaps, in the process, changing us. She spends time with Amazon employees whose tasks are constantly surveilled, and with invisible staff thousands of miles away in India and Costa Rica, watching hours of mind-numbing video footage, to train the AI systems monitoring the warehouses. “We think we’re robotising our work, but what if we’re robotising ourselves?” she asks. She talks to translators who feel the joy has drained out of their work,

Jun 14, 2026 → Jun 15, 2026