Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

The true story of what happened the first time machines came for human jobs--how an underground network of 19th century rebels, the Luddites, took up arms against the phenomenon of automation--paired with a contemporary investigation into the power, threat, and toll of mechanization today What might be the most pressing story in modern tech begins not in Cupertino, nor Redmond, Seoul, or Shenzhen. It begins two hundred years ago on a road in Yorkshire, England, with the brutal murder of a cloth manufacturer who was punished for taking advantage of a new technological advancement: the shearing frame. His attackers feared nothing more than the loss of their jobs to this new machine, but the ensuing class struggle brought 19th century England to its knees. We live now in the second machine age, when a similar anxiety about machines replacing human labor runs high. Technology imperils millions of jobs, robots oust workers en masse from factories, and artificial intelligence will soon even remove drivers from cars. How will this all reshape our economy and the way we live? And what can we do about it? The answers lie in the story of our first machine age, when mechanization first came to British factories at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Intertwined with a lucid examination of our current age, the story of the Luddites, the working-class insurgency that took up arms against automation (at a time when it was punishable by death to break a machine), Blood in the Machine reaches through time and space to tell a story about how technology changed our world--and how it's already changing our future.