AI, Automation & the Future of Work

In 1812, a band of English textile workers calling themselves Luddites smashed the mechanical looms that were putting them out of work. They were hanged for it. Their name became a slur, shorthand for anyone too backward to appreciate progress. But the Luddites were not stupid. They were skilled craftsmen who saw clearly that the new machines would destroy their livelihoods, and they were right. The handloom weavers of Lancashire, once among the best-paid workers in England, spent the next three decades sliding into destitution while factory owners grew rich.

The story eventually acquired a happy ending. New industries absorbed displaced workers. Real wages rose. Life expectancy increased. The children of ruined weavers became factory hands, then clerks, then engineers. Economists tell this story to reassure us that Job losses caused by machines, software, or other technologies replacing human labor. The term was popularized by John Maynard Keynes in 1930, who predicted it would be a "temporary phase of maladjustment." Whether current waves of automation will follow the same pattern as previous ones — short-term displacement followed by new job creation — is one of the central economic debates of the twenty-first century. is always temporary, that the market creates new jobs to replace the ones machines destroy.

What gets left out is the timeline. The adjustment took roughly fifty years. Two full generations lived and died in conditions worse than their grandparents had known. The happy ending was real, but so was the suffering that preceded it. The question facing us now is whether we are entering another such period, and whether this time the disruption will follow the same arc, or a different one entirely.