Luddism
In the early 19th century, many facets of England's economy were rapidly industrializing, but its textile industry was just exploding in terms of productivity and growth.
That explosion was the consequence of machines that could massively amplify the output of the business entities producing things like linens and clothing.
A cluster of fancy new steam-driven mechanisms amalgamated into semi-automated, building-sized manufactories (consisting of interconnected devices like spinning jennies, water frames, and self-acting mules) allowed textile companies to shift from a cottage industry model—where families ran mini-textile-making efforts from their homes, producing small quantities of raw materials from cotton and finished textile products from those raw materials—into a true, industrial effort.
That transition allowed the British (which already largely controlled international trade) to compete with cheaper textiles coming out of India and other foreign markets, increasing their output by orders of magnitude, and by some measures improving the quality of their goods, as well.
This was a wonderful turn of events for the folks who owned these textile factories, and to some degree for the folks who benefitted from their output, who could suddenly afford a wider range of better textile products.
It was far less good for the people working in that now-endangered textile cottage industry, however.
These families were losing relevancy, their skills no longer applicable, and though they'd worked hard to build Britain's textile market for generations, accumulating the assets and knowledge they needed to do so at great personal cost, lower-skilled workers could now be brought in to make sure the automated looms and such didn't gum-up or break-down; lower-paying work for lower-skilled labor.
This turn of events led to the creation of what became known as the Luddites, a group consisting of these increasingly irrelevant and devalued workers who took their name from a probably mythical (though possibly based on a real person) character named Ned Ludd, who was kind of a British, textile-focused John Henry (a mythical, American railroad worker who was highly skilled and who could do his work faster and better than the machines that were being developed and deployed to replace him and his colleagues).
The Luddites were not the first group of British workers to decide to smash the machines that were replacing them and thus denying them paying work, but they became the best-known of these groups, and beginning in 1811 they terrified their former bosses to such a degree that those bosses started killing them on sight.
The government was eventually called in to help put them down, the police arresting anyone accused of being a Luddite for relocation to a penal colony or, in some cases, execution.
This wave of protests subsided about five years after it began, in 1816, but the concept lives on in the sense that we maybe shouldn't just blindly accept all new technologies, even if they seem to promise us all sorts of benefits; there are consequences, even if they're of the human sort rather than a directly comparable economic variety, and even if they’re initially limited to just one group of people.
In Kenya, recently, a group of tea-pickers decided to destroy the tea-plucking machines that were brought in to replace them.
At least 10 such machines were set ablaze during protests over the last year, costing the companies that bought them something like $1.2 million, and leading to at least one protestor death and the injury of quite a few police officers and bystanders.
Kenya is the third-largest tea exporter in the world, and like the British with their textiles, the Kenyan tea industry is trying to compete against international firms that are threatening to nudge them out of that position.
Some of these tea-plucking machines can reportedly replace about 100 workers apiece, which is impressive and arguably justifies their price tag, but is not great for all those workers who understandably worry they'll be fired, despite many of them being told these machines are meant to help increase the scale of production, not elbow-out human laborers.
Many of the seemingly at-risk workers in the Kenyan tea industry are young women who don't have the skills or opportunities necessary to get work in a different sector, and similar to Britain's textile workers, that focus and specialization is part of why this transition could be so devastating to their individual economic fortunes: if they lose this work, there's no other place for them to go, at least in the short-term.
A recent report from McKinsey says that artificial intelligence technologies of the kind that have been released to the public since the end of 2022 could add trillions of dollars to the global economy and increase labor productivity for decades into the future, but it also indicated that 60-70% of the labor knowledge workers do, today, is now under threat, as today's iterations of these AI can capably do much of the work those laborers perform.
This is a large-scale concern, then, that applies to everyone from tea-pickers in Kenya to graphic designers in Berlin and HR workers in Omaha.
And as with the Industrial Revolution, there's a sense that all of this is inevitable, because productivity and profits power a lot of the machinery of our our global systems, and anything that amplifies those elements will definitely be rolled out, posthaste, whatever the consequences.
There almost certainly is a way to ameliorate the damage to individuals and communities that will be sparked by this transition—reeducation programs for folks whose jobs disappear into the machinery and AI ether, for instance, alongside better social safety-net programs.
But those programs will need to be put into place, today, not a handful of years from now, if they’re going to be effective, because this transition is already happening and it's foolhardy to assume people who are no longer able to pay their rent or for food will simply give up and walk away, rather than taking some kind of action against a system that doesn't seem to be accounting for human suffering and economic disenfranchisement.
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