The Luddites and AI
I came across some interesting stats from our old friends at McKinsey estimating that 35% of workers now fear workforce displacement due to AI and in regions with high AI adoption like India and the Middle East, nearly half of employees worry their roles could disappear entirely over the next decade.
The questions being raised are not only “Will I lose my job to AI?” but also "How will AI change my job?".
History tells us people have asked these same questions before. The Luddites are history's most misunderstood technology critics. Popular imagination paints them as backward-looking workers who smashed machines because they feared progress. The reality was quite different. Between 1811 and 1816, skilled textile workers across England organized to destroy the automated machinery that factory owners were using to replace them. These weren't random acts of vandalism. As Brian Merchant documents in his book "Blood in the Machine," the Luddites were strategic, organized, and had clear goals. They understood that the problem wasn't the machines themselves, but how they were being deployed and the people behind their deployment. "It was an uprising not against progress but against the first tech titans," Merchant writes. The Luddites opposed the social relations being constructed by the new technology—the way it concentrated power and wealth while degrading skilled work.
The current AI wave presents us with two possible futures for work. One path sees AI as a tool that handles routine tasks and frees workers to focus on strategic and creative work they find meaningful. This version promises to eliminate drudgery while preserving human agency and skill.
The other path is more troubling: AI systems take over the interesting, creative aspects of work while humans are relegated to feeding them data and managing their output.
Workers become supervisors of machines rather than skilled practitioners of their craft. Dr. Philippa Hardman, a learning scientist in the UK has highlighted how this second path risks creating widespread professional dissatisfaction, where people technically have jobs but find little meaning or fulfillment in them.
The Luddites ultimately lost their battle against the factory owners, crushed by state power and mass imprisonment. But their core insight remains relevant: the question isn't whether technological change will happen, but who controls it and how the benefits are distributed. Like the Luddites, we can ask hard questions about who benefits, who decides, and whether the path we're on serves human flourishing in the workplace or just technological efficiency.
The machines aren't coming for our jobs—people with specific interests and incentives are, by again choosing to deploy machines in particular ways that impact the many without much thought. The UK Government`s £2 billion AI Opportunities Action Plan is a step in the right direction.
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Blood in the Machine
