“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates

One of the common themes I repeatedly see online is the notion that "AI can't do X," "AI will never be able to do Y," or "Z job is safe because AI is terrible at it." Generally, this sentiment is expressed by engineers, mid-level managers, and sometimes even this author.

But why is it that, while this technology is only improving and getting better, there seems to be an odd resistance to it?

To understand how not unique this is, we must go back a few years; to the early 1800s.

Understanding the Luddites.

Without boring you with an entire history lesson, the Luddites represented a resistance to the incoming industrial revolution. Specifically, textile machines automated much of the knitting process and led to the replacement of skilled workers in textiles with lesser-skilled operators. While this is simply stated, the overall significance of the movement cannot be understated. In some cases, workers were noted to have attacked and burned factories that had adopted the new automation and machines.

"When the economic pressures of the Napoleonic Wars made the cheap competition of early textile factories particularly threatening to the artisans, a few desperate weavers began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines." (src. history.com)

To the Luddites, however, this push to automation meant many things. While these machines represented mechanical progress, they also implied that a worker who spent years or decades honing their craft was no longer needed. A company could produce a product with non-skilled employees who didn't need to know how a product was made, but instead could supervise its production by a machine. Understandably, they were upset. Again, their livelihood was threatened. Years spent training and for what? Only to be replaced and left to age into oblivion.

Identity

While the Luddites represented a resistance, one of their failures was foresight. After all, these machines needed to be maintained. Now, there were larger reliances on metals, petroleum products, raw materials, and people. Rather than explore these new concepts, they proceeded to attack the threat. The Luddites suffered from role identity and role fusion. Role identity is the portion of a person’s self-concept that is defined by the social roles they occupy, emerging when the expectations and behaviors of a role become internalized and used to guide how they think, act, and evaluate themselves. Role fusion is a psychological state in which a social role becomes fully integrated with an individual’s identity, such that the distinction between “who I am” and “what I do” collapses, and the role is experienced as the self.

In this context, the weaver was not simply a job but a stable organizing principle for meaning, status, and competence. As mechanization and automation advanced, it did not merely threaten wages; it destabilized the standards by which individuals evaluated their own worth. Because role identity ties behavior to established norms, adaptation becomes psychologically costly: to adopt the machine is to violate the very criteria that previously defined skill and legitimacy. Under role fusion, that cost escalates further; technological displacement is experienced not as a market shift but as a direct erosion of the self.

Furthermore, this helps explain why the Luddites’ response skewed toward destruction rather than transition. The introduction of machinery and automation created adjacent roles--maintenance, operation, supply chains--but these were not perceived as viable continuations of identity. They lacked continuity with the internalized schema of craftsmanship for themselves. The result is a form of cognitive and social lock-in: when identity is tightly coupled to a specific mode of production, alternative roles, even if economically rational, are filtered out as incompatible.

What did they accomplish?

Unfortunately for the Luddites, automation happened. In fact, it didn’t just happen; it exploded. While some likely reskilled, found new jobs, retired, or even continued crafting products, they raised a valid social problem. As the wheels of mechanization and automation turned, what was to happen to them? They were effectively sold a lifestyle and profession that were no longer needed. While their overall movement of rejection took on and was even celebrated, what they fought against still took over.

So what did they accomplish? They raised a social movement. They showed the community that changes were coming and that they too were going to feel the effects evenetually. What happens to people when their profession or skill is no longer needed thanks to the era of automation and mechanization? In addition, it critiqued the practice of replacing people with cheaper, less-skilled labor; potentially effecting quality and disrupting already-established trades.

Although their movement was dulled, it was never fully silenced. In all likelihood, it was only just the beginning.

The Typist

Perhaps one of the little-talked-about roles is/was the typist. For thousands of years, simply recording data had been excruciatingly manual. Even early forms of duplication required teams of people, and the result was never perfect. While the Printing Press, arguably one of the most transformative inventions ever made, enabled duplication en masse, it was large, limited to pages at a time, required careful precision with type, and didn’t lend itself to simple correspondence, business communication, or short documentation.

Imagine you’re tasked with producing documentation for a new product or feature. In something like Microsoft Word, it might only be a few pages. Now imagine producing that same documentation entirely by hand with a pen. What happens when you make a mistake? How do you maintain consistency? How do you ensure legibility across multiple copies?

Solving that gap required something with more finesse, something a clerk or operator could use to put words directly onto paper with less worry. The typewriter emerged. Where the printing press transformed duplication and distribution of information, the typewriter became instrumental to the world of business.

To quote P.G. Hubert Jr:

"With the aid of this little machine an operator can accomplish more correspondence in a day than half a dozen clerks can with the pen, and do better work"

While the typewriter was indeed transformative to business, it opened up something new. People who could type became necessary, not optional. Typing shifted from a niche skill into a core competency, especially in administrative and professional settings. Entire school curricula emerged around it, with structured courses, drills, and certifications designed to produce workers who could operate efficiently. Over time, typing became less of a specialized role and more of a baseline expectation for participation in modern office work.

Typing, however, wasn’t without criticism. Among the critiques were that typed text felt impersonal, that new workers could be trained to type faster than their experienced counterparts, and that the skilled labor of copyists and clerks became less differentiated. Early recipients of typed letters even saw them as discourteous or mechanical, lacking the personal touch of handwriting, and in some cases assumed a third-party had produced the message rather than the sender themselves. In offices that still valued penmanship as a mark of professionalism, the uniformity of typed text was not seen as efficiency, but as a loss of craft. What had once been a personal skill became standardized output. Ah yes, soft Luddism was alive and well.

Let's fast forward just a few years, shall we?

The Internet

Remember the first time you used the Internet? Maybe not, however, for those of us that were there near the beginning do. Nowadays, most people cannot fathom even a day without interacting with the Internet in some way. The printing press essentially became cracked out, distributed, open, accessible, and cheap. While used for many operations, the Internet as we know it was not without critique.

When the Internet began to take shape, the reaction followed a familiar pattern to that of the typewriter. Not outright rejection, but skepticism rooted in uncertainty, displacement, and control. Critics argued that information online would be unreliable, that expertise would be diluted, and that traditional institutions such as publishers, educators, and gatekeepers would lose their role in filtering knowledge. In the mid-1990s, some historians even described their concerns explicitly as “neo-Luddite” critiques of the Web, warning that its openness could erode standards rather than elevate them. (src: rrchnm.org)

There were also concerns about what the Internet would do to work. If anyone could publish, what happens to professional writers? If information is free, what happens to industries built on controlling it? These are not new questions. They mirror the same anxieties seen with earlier technologies: the compression of skill, the flattening of expertise, and the replacement of established roles with systems that scale faster than people.

It wasn’t machines being smashed. It was credibility being questioned, institutions resisting displacement, and a general discomfort with a system that removed friction from information itself. Different form, same instinct.

It All Still Happened

The resistance, rejection, concerns, critiques, and destruction. These are many of the recurring themes observed over the last several hundred years. But something stands out. Change happened anyway. While the Luddite movement resisted the mechanization of their craft, it happened. Teams of clerks were reduced to a handful of typists. Typists were eventually displaced by modern computers and printers, as digital communication replaced much of their work. The roles and occupations changed, but the core issue did not.

When we look to the current future, we see many of these same critiques with AI. Concerns around job displacement, reliability, and control surface almost immediately. There is a recurring fear that expertise is being compressed, that systems can produce output without fully understanding it, and that roles built on knowledge and judgment may be reduced or redefined. Surveys already show widespread anxiety about AI’s impact on employment, particularly around automation of both routine and knowledge-based work.

There are also deeper concerns. That these systems may reinforce bias rather than eliminate it, that decisions become less transparent, and that control shifts from individuals to opaque systems. The language changes, the technology changes, but the pattern does not. The same tension remains. Efficiency versus craft. Scale versus control. Automation versus identity.

AI is Coming for You

To the naysaying engineer, manager, or analyst. I daresay that AI is coming for you. It may not replace you entirely; however, it will certainly touch components of your work, either directly or indirectly. The cat is out of the bag, as they say. While much of the output is not yet at the perceived level of perfection that experienced workers have, it is gaining traction.

Secondly, it does what the Luddites feared. It enables lesser- or differently-skilled workers to produce similar products at faster intervals. Businesses are not going to ignore this fact. Just as with weaving machines and typewriters, business will not ignore it. But this is only one side of the pattern. The same forces that compress some roles tend to create others. Entire categories of work emerge around the new technology, often in ways that are not obvious at the outset. Historically, most job growth has come from roles that did not previously exist, driven by technological change. AI appears to follow that same trajectory, with projections suggesting both displacement and substantial creation of new roles as industries adapt. The roles and occupations will change again. The tension will remain.

There is also a more subtle challenge. Not one of capability, but of identity. If earlier resistance was driven by role identity and role fusion, then the same risk exists now. When what we do becomes tightly coupled with who we are, shifts in tools feel like erosion rather than evolution. The lesson is not just to adopt new systems, but to avoid anchoring identity to any single form of work. The tools will change. The underlying skills, if abstracted correctly, will carry forward.