LUDDITE LESSONS

The weavers lost the fight to save their livelihoods. As A.I. looms, can we do better?

- BY JOHN CASSIDY

The challenge is to make A.I. work for us, rather than the other way around.

In the early hours of April 12, 1812, a crowd of men approached Rawfolds Mill, a four-story stone building on the banks of the River Spen, in West Yorkshire. This was Brontë country—a landscape of bleak moors, steep valleys, and small towns nestled in the hollows. The men, who'd assembled on the moors hours earlier, were armed with muskets, sticks, hatchets, and heavy blacksmith's hammers. When they reached the mill, those at the front broke windows to gain entry, and some fired shots into the darkened factory. But the mill's owner, William Cartwright, had been preparing for trouble.

During the previous twelve months, a wave of attacks had swept through textile factories across central and northern England. The unrest began in Nottinghamshire, where stocking knitters stormed their employers' premises and destroyed newfangled knitting frames, which they blamed for undercutting wages and reducing them to penury. These attacks spread to Lancashire, the heart of textile manufacturing, and to Yorkshire, where mill owners had begun mechanizing the ancient craft of “dressing” woollen cloth—raising the nap and cutting it into finished pieces.

For centuries, the “shearers” or “croppers” who practiced this craft had formed something like an artisanal priesthood, raising the nap with the heads of teasel plants and finishing the cloth with handheld shears in a ritual of skill passed from father to son. Now came the machines—the gig mills with their cold metal rollers and the shear-ing frames that needed just one man turning a crank, like an organ grinder playing a funeral march for an entire way of life.