AI may come for your job. It’s not the end of the world — it’s the start of a new one.

As long as there’s been new technology, there’s been opposition to it. What do these protests have in common? Environmental concerns? Resistance to billionaires? Fears that the world will end? No: people are simply scared that technology will replace their jobs.  

Today, it’s AI and data centers. But in early 19th century Britain, skilled textile workers feared that machinery would allow employers to replace them with cheaper labor and reduce wages. They petitioned officials, organized protests and destroyed knitting frames and other textile machinery. A few decades later, Britain’s Locomotives Act of 1865 imposed extraordinary restrictions on mechanically powered road vehicles: a three-person crew, including someone walking ahead with a red flag, and speed limits of 2 miles per hour in towns and 4 miles per hour in the countryside.  

In the mid-20th century, a union representing musicians in the U.S., fearing that the musical recordings on the radio and jukeboxes would compete with their own live performances, forbade their members from making commercial recordings. A few decades later, both Universal and Disney sued Sony Corporation over its Betamax recorder, arguing that Sony was responsible for copyright infringement when viewers recorded television programs. Industry lobbyist Jack Valenti notoriously compared the VCR’s threat to the “Boston strangler.”

In the 1980s, newspaper workers went on strike........

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