Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine is the story of the Luddite movement in 19th-century England. Luddites were groups of English textile workers displaced by automation technologies and struggled to protect their livelihoods.
In contemporary English, we refer to people who oppose new technologies as Luddites, but Luddites were neither against new technologies nor technological automation. They wanted income, food, and housing security; they wanted a share of the fruits of their labour that helped textile entrepreneurs maximize the performance of their technologies and minimize their reliance on human labour to the point that industrialists were hiring children as machine operators.
In some gruesome accounts, many of these children ended up crushed to death inside these factory machines. Sometimes, their employers wouldn’t stop the machines to save a child caught in the machine because stopping the machines could hurt productivity. Workers had to continue to work while their co-worker’s bodies were being crushed and mangled in the gears of industrial machines. A common form of punishment was to force unproductive children to stand near dangerous areas of industrial machines for hours, where a slight movement could result in severe injuries and amputations. The Tory governments heavily supported textile industrialists and entrepreneurs at the time, which eventually crushed the Luddite movement by arresting and publicly “un-aliving” the Luddite leaders and members.
Throughout the book, the author frequently connects modern-day AI and cloud automation technologies that could or will make jobs vanish faster than we can recreate them in new domains. The book has many interesting historical references and facts to keep you curious.