The Magic Circle rejected robot magician D4YRL for membership on the grounds that the automaton failed to engage audience emotions as a human performer would. The decision is cited as a recent example of a body confronting questions about what it means to be human amid rapid advances in robotics and AI, framing a discussion of Sarah O’Connor’s book We Are Not Machines, which examines how AI is changing jobs and, potentially, workers themselves through examples including surveilled Amazon employees, de-skilled translators and autonomous mining trucks introduced collaboratively in Sweden.