AI Isn’t a Revolution—Yet

Foreign Policy | Priya Satia

Artificial intelligence executives claim their technology is too inherently revolutionary to face antitrust and product liability regulations, exploiting a misunderstanding of how historical transformations unfold. Stanford University professor Priya Satia argues that the 18th-century Industrial Revolution was not an overnight shift driven by unfettered genius, but a gradual process shaped by British workers who rioted, formed underground unions, and petitioned against steam power to protect their livelihoods.

Just as British resistance and government military contracts drove industrialization, the United States government currently accelerates artificial intelligence adoption through public funding and a failure to enforce existing product safety laws. Citizens can reclaim democratic oversight by organizing new forms of labor action, shifting pension investments, supporting concerned scientists, and pursuing litigation like a nonprofit's recent lawsuit against OpenAI over a Hugging Face security breach. Public pressure can successfully alter the trajectory of technological deployment, mirroring the European Union's 2024 restrictions that slowed product rollouts.

Comment

Corporate framing of artificial intelligence as an inevitable, autonomous force relies on a distorted teleology of industrialization that obscures the deliberate policy choices driving technological adoption. The historical parallel of 19th-century machine-wrecking movements demonstrates that public pushback targets exploitative labor relations and accountability vacuums rather than the underlying machinery itself. Consequently, the current push by firms like Anthropic to secure liability exemptions mirrors early industrial efforts to insulate capital from the social costs of displacement.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If the current deployment of large language models mirrors the unregulated factory expansion of the early 19th century, does the historical precedent of Luddite resistance offer a viable model for contemporary labor organizing, or have modern digital supply chains structurally insulated AI infrastructure from effective localized disruption?

The structural isolation of cloud-based data centres makes physical machine-wrecking obsolete, yet the emergence of organized technical dissent points toward targeted legal challenges and supply-chain divestment as modern equivalents. The historical trajectory suggests that effective constraint will require coordinated institutional friction rather than spontaneous localized sabotage.

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