There is a spectre haunting the modern economy, and it writes in flawless prose. It paints, it composes, it codes, and it analyzes. Generative Artificial Intelligence, a technology that seemed like a parlor trick just yesterday, now feels like an existential threat to entire professions.
Artists and writers see their work scraped and mimicked. Programmers watch AI write its own elegant code. Lawyers, doctors, and analysts—professions built on years of specialized knowledge—are being told that a Large Language Model can now do a "good enough" version of their job, instantly and for pennies.
The anxiety is palpable and personal. It's not just a fear of change; it's a fear of obsolescence. It's the cold, creeping question: "Is my skill, my craft, my entire career, about to become worthless?"
The Misunderstood Luddites
When this fear surfaces, a single, dismissive word is often used to shut it down: "Luddite."
To call someone a Luddite today is to call them an ignorant, backwards-looking technophobe, a fool smashing a machine they don't understand. We invoke the Luddites as a cautionary tale of progress, a punchline about those who stood in the way of the inevitable and were, quite rightly, run over by it.
This popular understanding is not just wrong; it's a dangerous misreading of history. And as my research for the new book, The World is Always Never Ending, reveals, the real story of the Luddites is the single most important historical parallel we have for understanding our current moment with AI.
If we're worried about our future, we should listen to them. Because they weren't wrong.
The Real Luddites: They weren't anti-technology. They were highly skilled artisans fighting against an economic system that used machines to devalue workers and destroy craft, not improve it.
Who Were the Luddites?
The Luddites, active in England from 1811 to 1816, were not anti-technology. They were not afraid of looms. Many of them used looms; they were highly skilled, middle-class artisans in the textile trade. They were weavers and croppers who had spent decades mastering their craft.
So what were they fighting? They weren't fighting the machine; they were fighting the economic system that the machine enabled.
Their enemy was the "factory model" and the new class of "master" who was deploying technology not to improve the work, but to devalue the worker.
As the book details, the new "wide-frame" looms and "shearing" machines were being introduced into massive, unregulated factories. These new machines produced a shoddier, lower-quality product, but they did it faster and, most importantly, they didn't require a skilled artisan. A master weaver's job could now be done by a low-wage, untrained laborer (including children) working in brutal, dangerous conditions.
The Luddites were watching, in real-time, the complete destruction of their economic value and their social identity. Their craft was being "deskilled" into a series of repetitive tasks. The "social wage"—the autonomy, respect, and community built around their trade—was being replaced by the tyranny of the factory floor.
They didn't smash machines out of fear; they smashed them as a last resort. They were, as one historian put it, engaging in "collective bargaining by riot". They had petitioned Parliament and been ignored. They had tried to organize and were outlawed. Their only remaining leverage was to attack the capital of the masters who were destroying their livelihoods.
They weren't fighting progress. They were fighting for a say in how progress was implemented. They were fighting for a future where technology served both the worker and the consumer, not just the factory owner. They were asking the fundamental question: Does this new technology serve humanity, or does it simply serve the greed of a few?
The Luddite in the Mirror
Does any of this sound familiar?
The anxiety rattling creative and professional classes today is profoundly Luddite in its character. A graphic designer isn't afraid of a "generate" button; they are afraid of a future where their hard-won skills in color theory, composition, and visual storytelling are devalued into a task of simply curating a machine's first draft.
The Pattern Repeats: Just as skilled weavers watched their expertise become "curation" of factory output, modern professionals fear becoming mere "prompters" or "editors" of AI-generated work.
A writer isn't afraid of a chatbot; they are afraid of a media ecosystem that values low-cost, AI-generated "content" over human-crafted "prose," turning them from a creator into a low-paid "prompter" or "editor" of a machine's output.
A programmer isn't afraid of coding assistance; they are afraid that their complex problem-solving abilities will be replaced by a system that just needs a "supervisor" to check for errors.
Like the Luddites, we are not watching the introduction of a simple "tool" that makes our jobs easier. We are watching the introduction of a system that threatens to devalue our expertise, destroy our autonomy, and concentrate wealth and power in the hands of those who own the models.
We are all, in our own way, skilled artisans watching the new "masters" roll out the "wide-frame looms" of Generative AI. And we are all asking the Luddites' question: For whose benefit?
The Real Lesson: History as a Spiral
The Luddites, as we know, "lost." They were brutally suppressed. The government sent 12,000 troops to stop them—more soldiers than were fighting Napoleon in Spain at the time. Many were exiled or executed. The factory system won.
This is where the flat-circle view of history leaves us with despair. But as The World is Always Never Ending argues, history is not a flat circle; it is a spiral. We revisit the same human conflicts, but from a different, higher elevation, hopefully armed with the lessons of the past.
The Luddites lost the battle, but their fight lit the fuse for a century-long war for workers' rights. The horrendous conditions of those first factories, which the Luddites had protested, eventually led to labor laws, child labor restrictions, the 40-hour work week, and the very concept of workplace safety. Society, in its messy, lurching way, eventually did adapt. It decided that technology must be subservient to human dignity, not the other way around.
History as Spiral: We revisit the same conflicts but from a higher elevation, hopefully learning from past battles. The Luddites' loss sparked a century-long movement for workers' rights and human dignity in the face of technological change.
We are now at the beginning of that same negotiation with AI.
The Critical Questions
The Luddite story teaches us that to simply dismiss modern anxieties as "technophobia" is to miss the point entirely. The critical questions are not about the technology; they are about power:
- Who owns the models?
- Who profits from the displacement?
- What is our social responsibility to those whose skills are devalued?
- Do we allow this transition to be a brutal, chaotic scramble for the scraps, or do we guide it with policy, ethics, and a vision for a shared future?
We are not doomed to repeat the past. But we are, as this historical spiral proves, required to rhyme with it. To be a "Luddite," then, is not to be an enemy of progress. It is to be a champion of humanity.
Finding Perspective Through History
This very pattern—the way we confront technological panic and disruption again and again—is a core theme of my upcoming book, The World is Always Never Ending: A Modern Antidote for the Worried Well-Informed and Terminally Online, which will be released on April 2nd, 2026.
The book traces this spiral, showing how we've navigated these moments before and how that historical perspective is the most powerful tool we have for staying sane in our own chaotic times.
Because here's what history teaches us: We've been here before. Different technology, same human fears, same fundamental questions about power and dignity. And somehow, messily and imperfectly, humanity has always found a way forward.
Not by ignoring the technology. Not by smashing the machines. But by insisting, as the Luddites did, that progress must serve humanity—not the other way around.