AI: The New Luddism

In 1811, textile workers in the English Midlands began destroying mechanical looms. It was not an irrational act: the machines threatened their livelihoods, their guilds, their way of life. History baptized them "Luddites" and for two centuries that name was used as a synonym for backwardness, fear of progress, irrational resistance to change.

But there is something popular history leaves out: the Luddites were not ignorant. They were skilled craftsmen who understood perfectly well what was happening. Their problem was not technology. It was how that technology was being used: to concentrate production, reduce wages, and eliminate skilled labor for the benefit of capital owners. Destroying the machine was a political cry, not a rejection of progress.

Two hundred years later, we are witnessing something similar. Artificial intelligence generates debates that mix genuine fear with misinformation, reasonable caution with regulatory panic, ethics with protectionism. And the temptation to call someone a "Luddite" for expressing doubts, or a "tech-bro" for dismissing them, prevents us from having the conversation that truly matters.

The Problem Is Not AI

It is worth proposing an uncomfortable idea: artificial intelligence, in itself, is not the problem.

The problem is the fears we project onto it. Fears that in some cases are legitimate and in others are simply the reflection of not understanding well what we are seeing. And when fears are not examined rigorously, they become regulation. And when regulation stems from fear rather than evidence, it produces exactly the effects it was meant to prevent.

The most recent and most illustrative case arrived on June 16, 2026, from the UK House of Lords. Baroness Beeban Kidron described something that deserves careful attention: the President of the United States gave Anthropic less than 90 minutes to make its most advanced models unavailable to non-American citizens. In under an hour and a half, entire sectors of the global economy that had built their infrastructure on those tools were cut off.

The Baroness framed it as a threat to UK national security. She is right. But there is something more in that story: the act itself is a demonstration of reflexive regulation taken to its extreme. Zero public discussion. Zero legislative process. Zero technical consultation. Ninety minutes.

When Fear Regulates

This is where the Luddite analogy comes into full focus.

The Luddites destroyed looms because they were afraid. The fear was understandable. But the consequences of that destruction did not solve the problem; they simply displaced it. The factories continued. Wages continued to fall. Change was inevitable. What the Luddites lost was not the battle against the machine; it was the opportunity to shape how the machine was integrated into their society.

Today we run the same risk. If we regulate AI from fear rather than understanding, we will not stop the development of technology. We will only determine who has access to it and who does not. And in that game, those with resources, infrastructure, and technical capacity to navigate regulation win. Those without are left out.

The decision to restrict access to a frontier model was not an example of prudent regulation. It was an example of how fear of losing a technological competitive advantage can become policy in 90 minutes. And the UK is responding, understandably, with the same instinct: build AI sovereignty, legislate quickly, raise barriers. Europe did it before with the AI Act. China did it before Europe.

What if we are all repeating the Luddite mistake? Not in the sense of opposing technology, but of reacting to the symptom rather than shaping the system.

What This Is Not Saying

This is not a claim that AI has no risks. It does. Some are serious, some are speculative, and intellectual honesty requires not confusing them.

Nor is it a claim that it should not be regulated. It should be, just as we regulate traffic, drug manufacturing, or the practice of medicine. Regulation is not the enemy of progress; it is the condition for progress to be sustainable.

The claim is that the quality of regulation matters more than its speed. And that regulation born from unexamined fear tends to be bad regulation: costly, imprecise, difficult to reverse, with unintended consequences that exceed those it was meant to prevent.

The legal example is especially instructive. Courts in several countries are sanctioning lawyers for submitting AI-fabricated case citations. The immediate regulatory response of some has been: ban AI in courtrooms. The more calibrated response, which states like New York and Florida are adopting, is: require verification. Do not ban the tool. Establish the standard of professional responsibility that must be met when using it.

The difference between those two responses is the difference between regulating from fear and regulating from understanding.

An Invitation, Not a Conclusion

No one holds the truth about artificial intelligence. Nobody does yet. We are in the middle of the change, not at the end of it, and the certainties we express today with too much confidence will probably seem naive to us in a decade.

But one conviction about the process holds firm: the decisions we make about how to integrate a transformational technology should not be made in 90 minutes, should not be made from fear, and should not be made without listening to those who understand it technically and those who live with its practical consequences.

The Luddites were right that something important was at stake. They were wrong about how to respond. Not because they were ignorant, but because they reacted from fear rather than acting from understanding.

Two hundred years later, the question remains the same: are we going to destroy looms, or are we going to shape how the cloth is woven?