The Luddites have a bad reputation. These days, the word is most commonly used as an insult—shorthand for somebody who doesn’t understand new technology, is skeptical of progress, and wants to remain stuck in the ways of the past. The Luddites were English textile workers who, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, resisted the introduction of new machinery. They would sneak into factories in the dead of night and destroy the power-looms they believed were threatening their jobs. The Luddites were not anti-machinery; many of them were machine experts and welcomed the introduction of new equipment that made their work easier.

Here is what the Luddites opposed: factory owners employing more lower-skilled and therefore lower-waged workers—often child laborers—instead of skilled clothworkers with years of training. The cloth these machines produced was lower quality, but it was so cheap to churn out, and there was so much of it, that the factory owners still turned a profit. The Luddites correctly recognized that this shift was not only debasing their art and depressing their wages, but also changing the very nature of what it meant to work. The Luddites saw that the winners from this technological “progress” would not be workers—neither the expert textile makers losing their jobs, nor the exploited children replacing them. The winners were the factory owners who, having found a new way to disempower their workers, were able to amass a greater share of the profits those workers generated.

Labor organizing at the time was illegal, so workers had few legal means of protest. The Luddites decided, instead of going after factory owners, to destroy the machines. But not any machines. They would target only the factories whose owners they believed were using new machinery as a pretense to erode their livelihoods. They would warn them in advance, giving them a chance to change their practices; some owners took it. Eventually, however, industrialists and the state came together, and British troops were sent to violently crush the Luddite movement.

Brian Merchant. In his new book, Blood in the Machine, offers – “If you look at the writers and the actors who are on strike today, they’re not worried that AI is going to write the next Martin Scorsese movie. They’re worried that it’s going to churn out something deemed good enough by the studios, who will then send it to the writers for a rewrite fee, and not give them full ownership of the script, and the writers will make less money. That technology is being used deliberately as leverage against the workers. And that pattern is eerily similar to what was happening in the Luddite day: the way that technology doesn’t really replace workers, because it can’t, but it is used to degrade their livelihoods, to cut down their wages, and to break their power.”

This might gives us all a different perspective on the use of Artificial Intelligence in the workplace.

Article credit: Billy Perrigo, Time online, 9-26-2023