Good Job is Slate's advice column on work. Have a workplace problem big or small? I am a hard-line hater of generative AI (ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc.). I think it's bad for the environment and bad for society. It burns water resources, exploits workers in the global south, plagiarizes art and writing, and eliminates badly needed entry-level jobs.

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.

Earlier this month, a popular lifestyle magazine introduced a new "fashion and lifestyle editor" to its huge social media following. "Reem", who on first glance looked like a twentysomething woman who understood both fashion and lifestyle, was proudly announced as an "AI enhanced team member". That is, a fake person, generated by artificial intelligence. Reem would be making product recommendations to SheerLuxe's followers – or, to put it another way, doing what SheerLuxe would otherwise pay a person to do. The reaction was entirely predictable: outrage, followed by a hastily issued apology.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience – taking things slowly for a novice like me – that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines. "The difficulty is, people do not realise," Yudkowsky says mildly, maybe sounding just a bit frustrated, as if irritated by a neighbour's leaf blower or let down by the last pages of a novel. "We have a shred of a chance that humanity survives." I have set out to meet and talk to a small but growing band of luddites, doomsayers, disruptors and other AI-era sceptics who see only the bad in the way our spyware-steeped, infinitely doomscrolling world is tending. I want to find out why these techno-pessimists think the way they do. I want to know how they would render change. Out of all of those I speak to, Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope.

When Molly Crabapple touched down in Italy last year for the International Journalism Festival, she expected the usual. The annual conference bills itself as Europe's largest media event, and Crabapple had planned to give a talk about her career as an artist and writer reporting from the front lines of conflict zones. But as she took in some of the panels, she felt herself growing uneasy. Sprinkled among the journalists discussing topics such as the war in Ukraine and the state of podcasting, some of the speakers were promoting the use of generative AI. She overheard someone say that journalists write too much, that much of their work could be automated.

"I'm absolutely a Luddite," the author and columnist Brian Merchant said the other day at an outdoor café in Brooklyn. He has long, brown hair and a goatee, and was wearing a plaid shirt over a T-shirt that read "The Luddites Were Right." On the chair next to him sat an HP printer. Merchant feels that the original Luddites, early-nineteenth-century cloth-makers who raided British factories and destroyed the new machines that were replacing them, have been getting a bad rap lately. Modern people tend to see them as fools who didn't appreciate the benefits of technology.

The Luddites arrived on the streets of San Francisco much as they did in the English factories two centuries ago: under cover of darkness and with iconic weapons in hand. An enterprising activist had observed (or perhaps gotten an insider tip) that placing an object on the hood of a self-driving car blocks the sensors it uses to see the road. Many objects would do, but cones were handy, undamaging, and happened to transform Cruise's robotaxis into four-wheeled unicorns. Unless it happens to be carrying a sympathetic passenger, the simple remedy of removing the cone is unavailable to the car. For weeks this summer, ahead of a state regulator's decision to expand their reign, the city's AV fleet was stricken by merry nocturnal raids.

I've been in the entertainment industry since I was nine. I joined the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) when I was 11 in 1977, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) when I was 22, and the Directors Guild of America (DGA) the following year. I got my start as a child actor on Broadway, studied film at NYU, then went on to act in movies like The Lost Boys and the Bill & Ted franchise while writing and directing my own narrative work. I've lived through several labor crises and strikes, but none like our current work shutdown, which began last spring when all three unions' contracts were simultaneously due for renegotiation and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) refused their terms. The unifying stress point for labor is the devaluing of the worker, which reached a boiling point with the rapid advancement of highly sophisticated and ubiquitous machine learning tools. Actors have been replaced by AI replications of their likenesses, or their voices have been stolen outright.

On December 15, 1811, the London Statesman issued a warning about the state of the stocking industry in Nottingham. Twenty thousand textile workers had lost their jobs because of the incursion of automated machinery. Knitting machines known as lace frames allowed one employee to do the work of many without the skill set usually required. In protest, the beleaguered workers had begun breaking into factories to smash the machines. "Nine Hundred Lace Frames have been broken," the newspaper reported.

The Luddites have a bad reputation. These days, the word is most commonly used as an insult--shorthand for somebody who doesn't understand new technology, is skeptical of progress, and wants to remain stuck in the ways of the past. That perception couldn't be more wrong, according to Brian Merchant. In his new book, Blood in the Machine, Merchant argues that understanding the true history of the Luddites is vital for workers today grappling with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in the workplace. "At least in my lifetime, the Luddites have never been more relevant," Merchant, 39, tells TIME. "We are confronting a series of cases where technology is being used by tech companies and executives in different industries as a means of trying to drive down wages and worsen conditions so that the entrepreneurial class can make more money."