We Are Not Machines Sarah O’Connor, Allen Lane (UK); Godine (US, out 11 August) If you are a fan of translated films, you may have noticed the subtitles on streaming platforms have changed in recent years. They aren’t wrong exactly, but they can come across as a bit, well, flat. “You get the meaning, but the language? It’s not as rich,” Petr Čermoch, a translator in the Czech Republic, tells Sarah O’Connor in We Are Not Machines, which explores how artificial intelligence is changing the way we work. That lack of richness is usually because the streaming platform has used AI to translate a script, then had a professional translator like Čermoch finesse it. Agencies expect translators to do this work more rapidly and have slashed their pay rates accordingly. But this new type of job is both harder and less rewarding. The translator has to look at the original source and the machine text simultaneously, meaning more effort, not less. At the same time, the joy of the work has gone. “It’s just a tedious job – boring and bland and lifeless,” says Čermoch. Yet, as O’Connor shows in her excellent and wide-ranging book, this is the sort of future we are increasingly being told to accept. AI replacing human translators is not a new premise, but O’Connor – who is a reporter at the Financial Times and has a weekly column on work – argues that the rather lifeless translation we are getting as a result is an example of how humans are adjusting themselves to fit into an AI-led world, rather than the other way around. Her central premise isn’t that AI is coming for all of our jobs, which is a well-trodden debate, but that we are already contorting ourselves to fit AI into our lives.