It was quiet. Windows and shutters were closed, fires and candles put out, meals eaten. The bustle and hum of the busy day receded, and only the occasional bark of a dog, or scratching in the undergrowth, or soft rustle of the wind in the trees broke the hush. The world exhaled and slumbered.
They came under cover of this darkness, when they wouldn’t be recognized. Dozens of them, masked, disguised, armed, angry. In the cool and still of the night there might be a chance for justice, if only they could hold their nerve.
They crept wordlessly toward the large, hulking building on the edge of town. A square, secure, forbidding presence in the gloom, the structure housed expensive and controversial new technologies—machines they believed were the enemy. Get caught, and the intruders would lose everything, even their lives. But they’d made an oath. This was it. There was no going back. The machines, the bosses, they could not win.
Outside they paused and then charged. Battering at the locked door, they eventually broke it down, streaming in. Using hammers and cudgels, they began smashing the machines. The clang of metal on metal reverberated. As debris was strewn across the floor, alarms began to sound. Shutters flew open, watchmen’s lanterns were hurriedly lit. The saboteurs—the Luddites—ran to the exit and melted into the soft moonlight. The stillness would not be returning.
Around the turn of the nineteenth century Britain was in the throes of an earlier wave. Technologies premised on steam and mechanical automation were ripping up the rules of production, labor, value, wealth, capability, and power. What we’ve come to call the First Industrial Revolution was in full swing, mill by mill changing the country and the world. In 1785, the inventor Edmund Cartwright debuted the power loom, a new mechanized means of weaving. At first it didn’t catch on. Soon, though, further iterations revolutionized textile manufacturing.
Not everyone was happy. The power loom could be operated by a single child, producing as much fabric as three and a half traditional weavers. Mechanization meant that weavers’ wages were more than halved in the forty-five years after 1770 even as the price of basic foodstuffs leapt. Men lost out in the new world to women and children. Textile work, from weaving to dyeing, had always been backbreaking, but in the factories it was noisy, regimented, dangerous, and oppressive. Underperforming children would be strung up from the ceiling or forced to wear heavy weights. Deaths were common. Hours punishing. To those on the front lines, paying the human costs of industrialization, this wasn’t a brave new techno-utopia; it was a world of satanic mills, servitude, and slights.
Traditional weavers and textile workers felt the new machines and the capital backing them were taking away their jobs, collapsing their wages, stealing their dignity, and unpicking a rich way of life. Laborsaving machinery was great for the owners of the factories, but for the high-skilled and well-paid workers who had traditionally dominated textiles, it was a disaster.
Inspired by a mythical figure called Ned Ludd, weavers across the English Midlands grew angry and organized. They refused to accept that picture, that proliferation would be the default and the wave of technology breaking around them was an economic inevitability. They decided to fight back.
In 1807, six thousand weavers demonstrated over pay cuts, a protest broken up by saber-wielding dragoons who killed a protester. From there a more violent campaign began to form. In 1811 the saboteurs got a name after a Nottingham mill owner received a series of letters from “General Ludd and the Army of Redressers.” No reply was forthcoming, and on March 11 unemployed weavers raided local mills, destroying sixty-three machines and stepping up the campaign.
In the months of clandestine raids that followed, hundreds of frames were destroyed. “Ned Ludd’s Army” hit back. All they wanted, they felt, was a fair wage and dignity. Their demands were often small—modest increases in pay, a phased approach to the introduction of new machinery, some kind of profit-sharing mechanism. It didn’t seem too much to ask.
The Luddite protests began to peter out, stamped down by a draconian set of laws and counter-militias. Around this time, England had only a few thousand automatic looms. But by 1850 there were a quarter of a million. The battle had been lost, the technology diffused, the old life of weavers destroyed, the world changed. To those losing out, this is what an uncontained wave of technology looks like.
And yet…
In the long term, the same industrial technologies that caused so much pain gave rise to a prodigious improvement in living standards. Decades, centuries later, the descendants of those weavers lived in conditions the Luddites could have scarcely imagined, habituated to that precarious world we take for granted. The vast majority of them came home to warm houses in winter, with refrigerators full of exotic food. When they got ill, they received miraculous health care. They lived much longer lives.
Just like us today, the Luddites were in a bind. Their pain and disruption were real, but so too were the improvements in living standards that benefited their children and grandchildren and that are enjoyed unthinkingly by you and me today. Back then, the Luddites failed to contain technology. But humanity adapted anyway. The challenge today is clear. We have to claim the benefits of the wave without being overwhelmed by its harms. The Luddites lost their campaign, and I think it’s likely that those who would stop technology today will, once again, not be successful.
The only way, then, is to do this right, first time. To make sure that an adaptation to technology is not simply foisted on people, as it was in the Industrial Revolution. But to ensure that technology is, from the start, adapted to people, to their lives and hopes. Adapted technologies are contained technologies. The most urgent task is not to ride or vainly stop the wave but to sculpt it.
The coming wave is going to change the world. Ultimately, human beings may no longer be the primary planetary drivers, as we have become accustomed to being. We are going to live in an epoch when the majority of our daily interactions are not with other people but with AIs. This might sound intriguing or horrifying or absurd, but it is happening. I’m guessing you already spend a sizable portion of your waking hours in front of a screen. Indeed, you may spend more time looking at the collective screens in your life than at any given human, spouses and children included.
So it’s no great leap to see that we will spend more and more time talking to and engaging with these new machines. The type and nature of the artificial and biological intelligences we encounter and interact with will be radically different from now. They will be the ones doing our work for us, finding information, assembling presentations, writing that program, ordering our shopping and this year’s Christmas presents, advising on the best way to approach a problem, or maybe just chatting and playing.
They will be our personal intelligences, our companions and helpers, confidants and colleagues, chiefs of staff, assistants, and translators. They’ll organize our lives and listen to our burning desires and darkest fears. They’ll help run our businesses, treat our ailments, and fight our battles. Many different personality types, capabilities, and forms will crop up over the course of the average day. Our mental, conversational worlds will inextricably include this new and strange menagerie of intelligences. Culture, politics, the economy; friendship, play, love: all will evolve in tandem.
The world of tomorrow will be a place where factories grow their outputs locally, almost like farms in previous eras. Drones and robots will be ubiquitous. The human genome will be an elastic thing, and so, necessarily, will be the very idea of the human itself. Life spans will be much longer than our own. Many will disappear almost entirely into virtual worlds. What once seemed a settled social contract will contort and buckle. Learning to live and thrive in this world is going to be a part of everyone’s life in the twenty-first century.
The Luddite reaction is natural, expected. But as always, it will be futile. Back then, though, technologists were not thinking of adapting their technology to human ends, just as Carl Benz and the first oil barons were not thinking about the earth’s atmosphere. Instead, technology was created, capital funded it, and everyone else got on board, whatever the long-term consequences.
This time containment must rewrite that story. There might not yet be a global “we,” but there is a group of people who are building this technology right now. We bear a huge weight of responsibility to ensure that the adaptation does not go one way. That, unlike power looms, unlike the climate, the coming wave is adapted to human needs, is built around human concerns. The coming wave should not be created to serve distant interests, following an agenda of blind techno-logic—or worse.
Too many visions of the future start with what technology can or might do and work from there. That’s completely the wrong foundation. Technologists should focus not just on the engineering minutiae but on helping to imagine and realize a richer, social, human future in the broadest sense, a complex tapestry of which technology is just one strand. Technology is central to how the future will unfold—that’s undoubtedly true—but technology is not the point of the future, or what’s really at stake. We are.
Technology should amplify the best of us, open new pathways for creativity and cooperation, work with the human grain of our lives and most precious relationships. It should make us happier and healthier, the ultimate complement to human endeavor and life well lived—but always on our terms, democratically decided, publicly debated, with benefits widely distributed. Amid the turbulence, we must never lose sight of this: a vision even the most ardent of Luddites could embrace.
But before we get there, before we can fulfill the boundless potential of coming technologies, the wave and its central dilemma need containment, need an intensified, unprecedented, all-too-human grip on the entire technosphere. It will require epic determination over decades across the spectrum of human endeavor. This is a monumental challenge whose outcome will, without hyperbole, determine the quality and nature of day-to-day life in this century and beyond.
The risks of failure scarcely bear thinking about, but face them we must. The prize, though, is awesome: nothing less than the secure, long-term flourishing of our precious species.
That is worth fighting for.