Blood in the Machine, of Luddites and AI

by Jack R. Johnson 12.2024

Call someone a Luddite today and we take it as an insult, a shorthand for somebody who doesn’t understand new technology, or worse, is afraid of progress. Yet, Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech has argued that the Luddites were in fact involved in a kind of class revolution. They came for the textile machines, not because they hated technology, but because they hated the class of men who refused to share technology’s benefits. Their activities and their arguments may bear some useful lessons for our own AI age.

The Luddites as a movement flourished in Britain from about 1811 to 1816. According to the Oxford English dictionary, in 1779, in a village somewhere in Leicestershire, a man named Ned Ludd broke into a house and ''in a fit of insane rage'' destroyed two machines used for knitting hosiery. Word got around. Soon, whenever a stocking-frame was found sabotaged folks would respond with the catch phrase ''Ludd must have been here.'' By 1812, whatever historical Ned Ludd existed, evolved into ''King Ludd,” a kind of mythological crowning, but the sabotage was real enough. Different versions of the legends place his residence in Anstey, near Leicester, or Sherwood Forest of Robin Hood fame.

Ludd’s activities were hardly insane. This was a time of widespread hardship in England, with trade conditions tough in the final years of the Napoleonic Wars. A Lancashire weaver’s weekly pay dropped from twenty-five shillings in 1800 to fourteen in 1811 because the market was being flooded with cheaper, inferior goods from the ‘advanced technological’ mills. Because the looming machines didn’t require much in the way of skilled labor, the owners preferred the automation and hired unskilled workers and later—to save even more money – children, sometimes as young as four years old, typically orphans. 

Initially, the textile workers wanted legal remedies and demanded help to ease the transition to automation. They proposed taxes on machinery-produced wares and pushed for the enforcement of laws on matters like fabric quality (which they produced much more ably than the machines.) These appeals were ignored by the English Parliament. So the Luddites came for the machines.

As they smashed looms and infuriated the textile owners, the Luddites claimed to speak for the workers. They wrote in a famous 1812 letter to Parliament that they were against any “machinery hurtful to the commonality.” Meanwhile, the factory bosses and the broader English upper class cultivated so called utopian ideals centered on technological progress and economic competition that echoes 21st century Wall Street’s wildly optimistic (and often nonsensical) rhetoric. One can almost hear Elon Musk waxing eloquent on the joys of technological progress, even as his ‘smart’ self-driving AI Teslas run over pedestrians. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nation and its invisible hand was a favorite intellectual touchstone.

The famous English poet Lord Byron took a stand for the Luddites, though, representing the ‘woke’ class of his day. In his maiden speech to the House of Lords, on February 27, 1812, he became one of the few members of the establishment to defend the Luddites. He spoke specifically against the Frame Breaking Act of 1812 that shockingly applied the death penalty to machine breaking—the Luddite’s forte.

“I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey; but never, under the most despotic of infidel governments, did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return, in the very heart of a Christian country.” Byron declaimed, “Is there not blood enough upon your penal code that more must be poured forth to ascend to heaven and testify against you? How will you carry this bill into effect? Can you commit a whole county to their own prisons?”

In the end, the pleas of Byron and others were ignored. The Frame Breaking Act of 1812 was passed, and at least 14 of the Luddites paid the ultimate price. Executions took place after an 1813 sentencing in both Lancashire and York, including the execution of 12-year-old Abraham Charlston. Other Luddites, more fortunate, were deported to Australia, then a penal colony. 

In his book on the Luddites, Brian Merchant points out the parallels between the antiquated 19th-century factory system and the gig economy of today, like Uber. “The taxi or ride-hail driver’s beef is not with the smartphone or with GPS, but with the ruse it supports: allowing Uber to declare that the basic rules of the taxi business no longer apply. A steady job becomes an unreliable gig—until workers start fighting back.”

Merchant observes similar dynamics within Amazon warehouses, and the striking workers of Hollywood, who demanded protections against AI-generated content. “These workers, like the historical Luddites, are wise to how technology could make conditions better, and speak out against its use to do the opposite.”

In fact, the Luddites anticipated much of the 21st  century discussions about unregulated advances in AI way back in 1811.  An argument recorded between two Luddite leaders of their day is illuminating. Apprentice saddlemaker, John Booth, argued with George Mellor, something of a Luddite firebrand, that the Luddites were right to resist the factory owners, but that they should embrace the technology—they should rebel for reform, not for refusal. “I quite agree with you . . . respecting the harm you suffer from machinery,” Booth said, “But it might be man’s chief blessing instead of his curse if society were differently constituted. . . . To say that a machine that can do this for you is in itself an evil is manifestly absurd. Under proper conditions it would be to you an almost unmixed blessing.”

“If, if, if!” George Mellor shouted in response. “What’s the use of such sermons as thine to starving men? . . . If men would only do as thou says, it would be better, we all know. But they won’t. It’s all for themselves with the masters.”

George Mellor in essence argued that it’s futile to imagine a world where an advanced technology is put to the common good in the future, when it is erasing livelihoods right now. If dismantling the machinery ended an immediate injustice and tipped the scales toward financial fairness; that should be the aim of their project. 

Unfortunately, this dispute remains as relevant as ever, two centuries later. The stakes with AI are perhaps even higher and more insidious, as unregulated AI finds itself touching almost every aspect of our lives from powering self-driving automobiles to determining who gets health care and who does not. In fact, just last year, United Healthcare was party to a lawsuit over its practice of using AI to deny health insurance claims. According to HealthcareDive.com, United Healthcare is being sued for allegedly using nH Predict—an AI algorithm—to deny claims despite the algorithm’s determinations being overturned in more than 90 percent of appeals. 

"The suit accuses UnitedHealth of breaking state law in more than 20 jurisdictions and breaching its contracts with members, resulting in unjust enrichment."

“The fraudulent scheme affords [UnitedHealth] a clear financial windfall in the form of policy premiums without having to pay for promised care, while the elderly are prematurely kicked out of care facilities nationwide or forced to deplete family savings to continue receiving necessary medical care, all because an AI model ‘disagrees’ with their real live doctors’ determinations,” the suit says. 

The violence such unregulated technological advances might provoke is equally taunting. What begins as a kind of amusing lark on the San Francisco streets, setting out orange traffic cones to snarl self-driving cars –an incident Brian Merchant mentions in the introductory chapter of Blood in the Machine, could well end with a murdered factory owner, as happened with Luddites when Parliament refused to regulate the use of the looms. George Mellor was eventually convicted of assassinating a factory owner, and was hanged, at the age of twenty-three.

Just this week, Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, was shot down quite publicly near Rockefeller center by an Luigi Mangione. The shooter’s bullets were inscribed with the words deny, delay, and depose an allusion to the usual legal moves made when denying claims for health insurance.  And Thompson’s assailant has been hailed by some on social media as a kind of mythical hero for standing up to the monolithic avarice of the health insurance industry, like a modern day Robin Hood, or King Ned Ludd.