From the Luddites to ChatGPT—What Happens When AI Takes Our Jobs?
1. Collateral Damage: The Price of Technological Progress
AI breakthroughs pour relentlessly into our feeds—each day another glittering billion-dollar promise—but when I meet former tech colleagues for drinks, the mood is far less triumphant.
The internet gold rush, it seems, has lost some of its luster. The hours are longer, the pay is stagnant, and the layoffs keep coming. The past couple of years have been particularly merciless: 2024 alone saw 150,000 job cuts in the tech sector, and this unsettling trend is expected to continue beyond tech throughout 2025, with “restructuring” and “optimization” recurring endlessly, keeping everyone perpetually on edge.
Some companies dangle voluntary severance packages, while others allocate quotas to each department—like homework assignments for managers to fulfill—only for those same managers to discover they've been laid off in later rounds. Then there are the ones that keep pivoting—a convenient euphemism for another round of house-cleaning. Quite a few friends of mine have been caught in the crossfire.
For Chinese workers, even relocation abroad isn't the escape hatch it once was. I know people who poured everything into securing an overseas transfer—only to have their entire teams dissolved before they could even settle down their families. "Business restructuring," the bosses called it, as these workers packed up their dreams and flew home at their own expense, forced to start job hunting all over again.
The fresh graduates have it worst. Many of them spent years earning a master's degree away from home, couldn't scrape together enough immigration points to qualify for a visa, came home, and now cannot even land a decent internship. It's giving me serious flashbacks to Japan's "Employment Ice Age"—that period where young people who graduated into economic stagnation and never quite recovered.
After a few drinks, the conversation inevitably turns to the same lament:
We're living through the worst possible timing.
We are the generation of workless, caught in the AI revolution before anyone understood its implications—becoming obsolete before schools could develop a proper curriculum to prepare us. So, here we are, frantically subscribing to AI newsletters, following dozens of tech influencers on our social media of choice, getting bombarded with updates about the latest models and applications,—desperately trying to keep up with a revolution rewriting itself faster than we can proofread.
It's precisely among this crowd of "AI enthusiasts" that a darker question has started to emerge:
What if technological progress has a price? And what if our entire generation is the one to pay it?
It sounds like a very modern anxiety. But two centuries ago, another group asked the exact same question—and they didn't just tweet about it. They grabbed hammers and went to war.
They were the Luddites—and they had some opinions about technological "progress."
2. The Real Story of the Machine Breakers
Picture this: Nottingham, England, 1811. The nights are getting restless. Groups of workers slip through the darkness like guerrillas, their faces blackened with coal dust, carrying axes and sledgehammers. They move with military precision toward a clear target: the machines that stole their livelihoods.
These were the Luddites, and they took their name from Ned Ludd, a stocking frame apprentice whose story became legendary through newspaper reports that began circulating in 1811.
Ludd had been an apprentice in Leicestershire, trapped in what the records called the "confinement" of the stocking frame—perhaps both the physical imprisonment standing in the same spot for hours on end, but also the psychological cage of mind-numbing repetitive work, the kind that slowly grinds away at your sense of self. When Ludd's performance started slipping, his master complained to the local magistrate, who prescribed “a little whipping” to straighten out the young man's attitude.
But instead of breaking Ludd's spirit, the punishment lit something else entirely. In a moment of pure rage, he grabbed a hammer and obliterated the machine that had stolen his freedom. Just like that, Ned Ludd became a legend.
But the textile workers who rallied under Ludd's banner had a more practical grievance: the new machines were making their skills worthless. Anyone could operate them, which meant that decades of apprenticeship and expertise suddenly counted for nothing. The numbers were stark—between 1796 and 1828, mechanization reduced the labor needed to produce broadcloth by seventy-five percent——work that once required four master craftsmen could then be done by one person babysitting a machine.
This wasn't just about money; it was about identity. These artisans watched their social status evaporate while factory owners enriched themselves.
Different groups experienced technological disruption differently:
- Skilled craftsmen saw their social status disappear overnight. They became the face of the Luddite resistance, fighting to preserve a way of life that was becoming obsolete.
- Unskilled workers flooded into the factories, at first grateful for the roofed work opportunities, only to discover that oversupply made their working conditions worsen over time. Some eventually joined the Luddites.
- Factory owners profited enormously by replacing skilled labor with machines and cheap, unskilled labor—including children.
The Luddites were not anti-technology zealots. Before resorting to violence, they exhausted all proper channels—petitions, peaceful demonstrations, and letters to Parliament. They gathered thousands of signatures demanding minimum wage protections and industry regulations. But the aristocrats turned a blind eye to their pleas.
When peaceful protest failed, violence felt like the only remaining option. Between 1811 and 1816, the Luddites organized nighttime raids on factories, methodically destroying the machines. They called their trademark sledgehammer "Enoch" and had a motto: "Enoch made them, Enoch shall break them."
Authorities responded swiftly and brutally. Factory owners formed vigilante committees and lobbied Parliament. In March 1812, the Destruction of Stocking Frames Act made machine-breaking punishable by death.
Violence escalated. In April 1812, Luddites assassinated William Horsfall, a factory owner leading efforts against them. The government declared open war on machine-breakers. The resulting arrests, trials, and executions crushed the rebellion by 1816.
In the decades afterward, the Industrial Revolution advanced rapidly in Britain, enriching factory owners, while workers’ conditions improved slowly. Only twenty years after the initial Luddite uprising did the Factory Acts of 1833 begin to address working conditions, especially for children and women. It wasn't until 1871, with the passage of the Trade Union Act, that workers gained legal recognition to organize collectively.
The Luddites weren't fighting technological progress itself—they challenged the distribution of its benefits. Having spent their lives mastering intricate skills, they questioned why automation's advantages should benefit only a privileged few.
It's a question strikingly relevant to the AI revolution today.
3. The Knowledge Worker Dilemma
Fast-forward two centuries, and we're living through our own machine revolution. AI isn't just another technology—it's what economists call a General-Purpose Technology, the kind that reshapes entire civilizations. And this time, it's coming for the knowledge workers—the people who “think for a living” with their college degrees and cognitive skills.
Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" in 1959 in his book "Landmarks of Tomorrow." This concept marked the evolution from what Upton Sinclair described as traditional "white-collar" workers in the 1920s to modern information economy professionals such as those in finance and tech. Knowledge workers apply advanced expertise and analytical skills to develop products or services, signaling society's shift from physical labor to information processing as the primary economic activity.
Looking at today's landscape through the lens of the Luddite era, the parallels are unsettling:
- The bosses haven't changed much. Like the factory owners of 1812, they control the means of production and see AI as a way to cut costs and increase profits.
- Tech workers face their own version of the skilled craftsman’s nightmare. Software engineers who've spent years mastering programming languages now watch AI write cleaner, faster code—and iterate itself through human feedback to improve relentlessly. Financial analysts find themselves outpaced by algorithms processing data at superhuman speeds, flawless and tireless. These are the new Luddites—highly educated, well-compensated, yet suddenly expendable.
- Traditional professionals, such as doctors and lawyers, occupy an interesting middle ground. Like the skilled artisans of old, the wealthy and well-connected among them lobby legislatures for protection, citing AI’s lack of explainability and safety concerns as reasons to restrict its reach into their fields. Others embrace AI, leveraging accumulated capital to transition from practitioners into employers, benefiting directly from efficiency gains. Yet a third group, driven by ethical conviction or loyalty to traditional craftsmanship, joins what amounts to a new Luddite movement, drawing on shared anxieties to rally wider opposition.
- Everyone else should, theoretically, benefit from cheaper, higher-quality AI-driven services. Yet the future feels less optimistic, because the AI revolution differs fundamentally from its industrial predecessor. AI-powered automation threatens nearly all forms of work, leaving fewer jobs untouched—and fewer people unaffected—than the machines of two centuries ago.
- Finally, parallels echo in the plight of today’s students. Ned Ludd’s rebellion was sparked by realizing his painstakingly learned skills had become worthless overnight. Today's university students grapple with a similar dread: Why spend years studying when AI may render their chosen fields obsolete before they even graduate?
The question that tormented Ned Ludd now haunts our entire generation:
When machines can do our jobs better than we can, what becomes of us?
4. The “Free Money” Experiment
With mass technological unemployment looming, thinkers and policymakers have been exploring what comes next. The most discussed solution is Universal Basic Income (UBI)—essentially, a government check sent to every citizen, no strings attached.
The idea goes back to Thomas Paine, one of America's founding fathers, and it's gained serious momentum lately. Elon Musk has been talking about it for years, arguing that when AI takes over most jobs, UBI becomes a necessity, not a luxury.
Musk stated clearly as early as 2018: "If artificial intelligence takes over most human jobs, Universal Basic Income UBI will become necessary."
The obvious criticism is that free money will turn us all into couch potatoes, reminiscent of the film Wall-E. Why work if you don't have to? Conservative economists have pushed this argument for decades, and intuitively, it makes sense.
But a fascinating experiment in Germany recently challenged this assumption.
A Berlin nonprofit called "Mein Grundeinkommen" tracked 122 people for three years, giving them €1,200 per month, no questions asked. The results were eye-opening:
- People kept working anyway. The participants worked an average of 40 hours per week—exactly the same as the control group that didn't get free money. As one researcher put it, "We found no evidence that people enjoy doing nothing."
- Their work got better. With financial security as a backstop, people were more likely to change jobs, start businesses, or go back to school. They took better risks and avoided desperate choices.
- They got happier and healthier. Stress levels dropped, mental health improved, and people reported feeling more autonomous and purposeful. Women especially felt more in control of their lives.
Similar experiments in Alaska (which has been paying dividends to residents since 1976), Stockton, California, and Finland have reached similar conclusions. Matthew Johnson, a public policy professor at Northumbria University, summed it up: "There's no evidence that basic income reduces economic activity. On the contrary, it gives workers security to make better choices."
It turns out that when people aren't terrified of losing their health insurance or becoming homeless, they don't just lie around watching Netflix. They do more interesting, productive, meaningful work.
5. “A World Without Work”
As AI continues its march through the economy, we're moving toward what Stanford Economist Erik Brynjolfsson calls "The Second Machine Age"—where the critical scarce resource isn't labor or capital, but ideas. The people who can dream up new products, services, and business models will do incredibly well. Everyone else... well, that's the question.
"In the future, Ideas will be the real scarce inputs—scarcer than both labor and capital."— Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, and Michael Spence
Oxford economist Daniel Susskind, author of A World Without Work, suggests we’ll need more than unconditional UBI. He proposes Conditional Basic Income—financial support tied to expectations of meaningful social contributions, such as creating art, caregiving, teaching, or community service.
Work offers more than money—it provides purpose, social bonds, and a sense of contributing to something larger than oneself. As AI overtakes traditional jobs, we'll be forced to redefine what it means to be valuable and useful.
This leads to difficult questions that our generation will likely face within our lifetimes:
- If you no longer had to work for money, would you still choose to work?
- If you did, what would constitute a meaningful societal contribution using your unique talents?
- If AI continues its rapid pace of progress, how far away are we from this future?
The Luddites faced a future that arrived faster than they could adapt—machines triumphed, factory owners flourished, and worker protections lagged decades behind. Today, we have a chance to chart a different course: to share the benefits of technological progress more equitably, leaving future generations a legacy that fundamentally redefines the purpose of work.