Ned Ludd was a weaver (or a fictional character) who so feared the arrival of powered weaving machines in the early 1800s that he wrecked several of them to make his point. The "Luddites" fought, and many died, trying to halt the march of progress. How would the world survive without weavers?
What would the world look like today if Ned and his descendants had successfully stopped the production of electric light bulbs to save the jobs of candle makers? Or blown up automobile factories to save the jobs of blacksmiths?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already causing massive disruptions, but not because millions of people are losing their jobs. The fear of people losing their jobs is threatening to bring the development of AI to a screeching halt, out of fear of job loss and the remote possibility that AI will end up killing us all.
American companies have already invested trillions of dollars to adopt AI, and workers can already see whose jobs are on the chopping block. A recent report from Microsoft Corporation predicts which jobs are most threatened by AI. Here are the top 10:
- Interpreters and Translators
- Historians
- Passenger Attendants
- Sales Representatives of Services
- Writers and Authors
- Customer Service Representatives
- CNC Tool Programmers
- Telephone Operators
- Ticket Agents and Travel Clerks
- Broadcast Announcers and Radio DJs
"The societies that won the future were never the ones that barricaded the door," writes Henry Miller. As Democrats, Republicans, and other political parties get in line to see how much and how fast they can delay/destroy/obliterate the new technology because some, perhaps many, people are going to lose their jobs, others, most notably China, are already flying into the future. The Communists won't allow the kind of hysterical opposition building in the U.S. against AI and the data centers that power it.
The question isn't whether AI will disrupt the labor force. It will. The question is whether those affected see their situation as a tragedy or an opportunity.
Last year, a Pew poll found that half of Americans are concerned about the increasing use of AI in daily life. Uber drivers fear Waymo. Doctors fear patients Googling their way to a diagnosis and treatment. Coders fear the coding assistant. Artists and cartoonists fear the image generator. These concerns aren't unfounded — technological transitions do hurt real people, and society owes displaced workers real help, not empty reassurance.
Here's the distinction that keeps getting lost: Disruption is not a reason to stop a technology.
Technology seldom eliminates work entirely; rather, it redefines it. Chatbots haven't replaced doctors — for patients with rare maladies, they've suggested tests and treatments doctors didn't know about. Spreadsheets didn't replace accountants. The internet didn't kill libraries, universities or newspapers; it forced them to get better or get out of the way.
We should worry most about younger workers just entering the workforce. These last two generations have been so coddled, so protected, that any disruption is likely to send them to a therapist rather than resolving to find something even better. They will be in the forefront of the movement to halt AI in its tracks.
I can remember losing my job at a trade association due to cutbacks during the bad recession of 1981-82. I didn't panic. I didn't join a protest to get my job back. I found a job in less than two months. It was a better, more challenging job. Would the Alphabet generations survive?
Here's what the doom narrative always misses: AI doesn't just replace human effort — it multiplies it. Doctors can now scan more research in minutes than any human could read in a lifetime. Engineers and drug developers can test a thousand design ideas instead of five. A two-person startup can operate like it has a department behind it. Researchers can crunch in an afternoon what used to take months. This isn't hypothetical. It's already happening in clinics, labs and small and large businesses.
AI will also create jobs. We don't know how many jobs will appear; all we know is that new technologies always — always — create more jobs than they destroy.
Always.
This doesn't mean that we should throw caution to the wind and adopt AI without questions. At the top of the list is the genuine threat to privacy, followed by national security threats, the concentration of power, and the remote threat of runaway AI. These threats are real and deserve scrutiny and, where necessary, sensible regulation. But imagine if we had listened to the doom merchants who warned against jet planes falling out of the sky or spoke against the dangers of developing life-saving gene therapies.
"Ned Ludd smashed the looms. The horse-and-buggy defenders tried to legislate the automobile away," writes Dr. Miller. "Both fought to freeze the world as it was instead of preparing for the one already arriving."
The AI world is barreling toward us at breakneck speed. Slow it down, yes. I have been advocating for that for the last couple of years. But there's a difference between being responsible and being a Luddite.
I don't think many politicians know, or care, about the difference.
