Vol. 42, No. 06
06/01/2026
From the Editor | Don’t Sacrifice Liberty in the Name of Progress
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, technological progress has faced determined opposition. The Luddites, skilled textile workers in early 19th-century England, famously smashed mechanized looms. These were not mindless reactionaries picketing against all progress; they protested the destruction of skilled jobs and high wages.Â
Some objections proved prescient. Early factory conditions brought real exploitation, child labor, and urban misery. Romantic critics such as William Blake decried “dark Satanic Mills.” Yet other Industrial Revolution-spawned fears were baseless or overstated. Skeptics warned that railroads would cause livestock miscarriages, or that electricity was a dangerous novelty. In hindsight, these technologies vastly improved living standards, though they certainly disrupted old ways of life, and not always for the better.
However, objections to artificial intelligence are demonstrably unique. Past innovations primarily replaced or augmented human physical strength and dexterity. AI targets the mind: cognition, decision-making, creativity, and judgment — aligning with the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s vision of fundamentally reshaping humanity. World Economic Forum advisor Yuval Noah Harari brazenly stated in a 2022 interview, “We just don’t need the vast majority of the population” thanks to modern technologies such as AI rendering human labor economically “redundant.”
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