A week ago, I was at our East Central District PR Conference and we heard a great talk from Ben Brugler and Dillan Kanya of Akhia Communications. The topic was AI….what else?

These are literally the words on everyone’s lips. I thought their presentation was strong because it was practical. There is a lot of doomy clickbait out there, which is probably good to avoid.

Here’s a quote from their website which captures the idea effectively.

“We don’t love AI. We’re just excited about some of the opportunities AI has given us.”

-Cathy McPhillips, Marketing AI Institute

By the way, they have an excellent AI round-up built for communicators. You can read it here and also sign up to get it by email…high quality, thoughtful stuff.

The emergence of AI has brought a word back into our lexicon: Luddite.

You have no doubt heard the term. It can be an insult or a badge of honor.

The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of cost-saving machinery, often by destroying the machines in clandestine raids. (Ned Ludd, the titular…something…was a nom de guerre).

The term today is synonymous with being obtusely anti-technology and anti-progress. Something like this guy comes to mind.

Not surprisingly, the idea of a Luddite has been reconsidered since AI took over the scene last year.

From Smithsonian Magazine, we learn that the Luddites were not anti-technology or fighting to reclaim artisanship. They were highly skilled machine operators who were comfortable with technology.

Their real beef:

British working families at the start of the 19th century were enduring economic upheaval and widespread unemployment. A seemingly endless war against Napoleon’s France had brought “the hard pinch of poverty,” wrote Yorkshire historian Frank Peel, to homes “where it had hitherto been a stranger.” Food was scarce and rapidly becoming more costly. Then, on March 11, 1811, in Nottingham, a textile manufacturing center, British troops broke up a crowd of protesters demanding more work and better wages.

A new book is coming out…Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant. I will tell you I have not read the book, but it was reviewed in the New Yorker and placed in the context of the current debate over AI.

The review (and Merchant) re-consider the Luddite legacy in a matter similar to the Smithsonian article. In closing the story, though, we hear this:

“Blood in the Machine” suggests that although the forces of mechanization can feel beyond our control, the way society responds to such changes is not. Regulation of the textile industry could have protected the Luddite workers before they resorted to destruction. One proposal suggested a tax on every yard of cloth made by machine.

And there I disagree. I get it. AI might be horrible. There might be huge consequences to the well-being of people. Technology might finally be coming for knowledge workers. It could take over the world, like a science fiction novel.

And yes…regulation could have protected workers. But it didn’t.

Here’s my point. Resistance is futile. In practice, the forces are beyond our control. The ultimate truth of the story isn’t understanding what the Luddites really were about, but that the Luddites lost. Technology marched right over them as it has so many similar people over time. It might march over me next.

I cannot think of any time that any new technology was killed or even slowed down because of its potential impact on anyone. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You can’t un-open Pandora’s box. And there’s a reason those stories are still floating around.

You don’t have to like it or love it. You can fear it. You can smash machines if you want. But it’s going to happen. Let’s go get it.