Kris Erickson
Co-Founder, WSA
Every generation lives through some technological advancement that changes everything. The assembly line, the personal computer, the internet, the smartphone in every pocket. AI feels different, and I wanted to know if that feeling was actually new, or if we’d just forgotten a chapter we’d already lived through. So, I combed through history looking for a real parallel, not just a comforting one, and one story kept resurfacing.
It’s 1811, Nottinghamshire, England. A group of framework knitters, skilled tradesmen who’d spent years Thank you.perfecting their craft, starts breaking into mills at night and smashing the new weaving machines inside. History calls them Luddites, and today that word is synonymous with anyone who is averse to new technology, a person too stubborn to learn something new. That’s not what a Luddite actually was. These workers weren’t confused about what the machine did. They understood it perfectly. A new machine let one untrained worker do the job of several trained ones, for a fraction of the pay, and it was about to erase a trade that had fed their families for generations. Being a Luddite wasn’t a stand against technology. It was a stand for the people the technology was about to leave behind.
Within a year, the unrest had spread into neighboring counties, and Parliament had seen enough. They passed a law that made machine-breaking a capital crime, the same sentence as murder. That’s how seriously the people in power took a group they publicly dismissed as too ignorant to understand progress.
Here’s the part that gets left out. An economist went back decades later and checked the numbers: British industrial output kept climbing, year after year, while regular workers’ wages barely moved for almost forty years. Some call it “Engels’ Pause.” It took two full generations before the upside of the Industrial Revolution actually reached the people who lived through the pain of it. The technology sprinted. The humans limped along behind it for a long, long time.
I think about the Luddites every time someone tells me AI is going to change everything, like that’s a brand-new thought. Sure, it will. The real question is whether we will let the human side limp along for forty years again, or whether we will learn from history and manage it this time.