Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
Times were tough in early-19th century England. The Napoleonic Wars had decimated the country’s economy. To save costs, wealthy textile factory owners replaced skilled artisans with automated machinery to create their goods. The workers fought back—literally—by raiding the factories and destroying the machines in these mills in what became known as the Luddite movement, named after the apocryphal leader of the raids.
Today, Luddite is synonymous with people who reject new technology—but we’ve seen the same struggles and frustrations with employers echoed throughout history, from Henry Ford’s assembly line, to mass food production, to self-check out lines at the grocery store. The most recent episode is now playing out in reaction to the AI boom.
Since the release of ChatGPT late last year, we’ve already seen it being hailed as a kind of turning point in the tech world, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the advent of social media and the internet itself. And it’s resulted in an infusion of billions of Big Tech dollars into generative AI, and a groundswell of companies embracing the tech quickly—much to the detriment of workers. Labor unions and activists have been caught off guard, and now they’re doing everything they can to fight back before it’s too late.