If I hear another well-intentioned person justifying their support for the regulation of AI with the qualifier “I’m no luddite, but …” I’m going to start breaking my own machine.

From ministers to union leaders to progressives watching from the cheap seats, there is growing recognition that untrammelled development of this technology carries significant risks.

But there is also a reticence to be seen as being anti-technology lest we are perceived as standing in the way of the productivity boom and consequent bounty of abundance that the boosters of these tools promise is just around the corner. After all, we aren’t luddites.

The problem with being forced into this defensive mindset is that we misread the challenge at hand, which is not so much about the nature of the technology but the power dynamics driving this change.

This is where the luddites and their misunderstood resistances to the last big technological revolution, chronicled in Brian Merchant’s ripping yarn Blood in the Machine, may help us think through our current challenges.

Here’s the TLDR: in early 19th-century northern England, textile workers buck up against a new technology that automates their work and replaces well-paid skilled jobs with machines. When factory owners reject demands that the benefits of the new technology be shared, they gravitate around the avatar of young “Ned Ludd” and begin breaking the new machines and burning down said factories. The resistance rages for five years until the British government deploys troops and criminalises their association, leading many of the rebels to be executed or........

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