10. Sarah O’Connor | Bridport Literary Festival | Sunday 08 November 10am

We’re told that a tsunami of change is sweeping the economy as AI replaces humans in the workplace

But when Sarah O’Connor ventured into the front line of this new industrial revolution, she found that employees weren’t generally losing their jobs to machines, they were losing their humanity. Work was becoming lonelier, less creative and highly controlled. We were at risk of turning ourselves into robots.

Drawing on stories from 19th century English cotton mills to 21st-century Swedish mines, the prize-winning Financial Times journalist tackles one of our age’s most important questions: how can we shape technology before it shapes us? She talks to Boris Starling.