The Return of the Luddites (www.thefp.com)

Noah Smith’s essay, "The Return of the Luddites," warns that the U.S. and other Western democracies are experiencing a mounting anti‑technology backlash driven by political polarization and collapsing trust in institutions. Drawing on historical examples and data, Smith argues that modern technology—whose advances over the past two centuries have made humanity roughly 20 times richer on average—is now being questioned or rejected in ways that risk reversing huge gains in living standards. He frames current skepticism toward transformative tech (including AI) as a potential civilization‑level mistake comparable to earlier societies that turned away from innovation. For the AI/ML community this matters on multiple practical fronts: public distrust and hardline politics can lead to restrictive regulation, funding cuts, research fragmentation, and barriers to deployment that slow progress and shift expertise and compute elsewhere. Smith’s warning reframes debates about ethics and governance as choices that may either preserve an innovation ecosystem or substantially degrade it—impacting everything from open research and model sharing to industrial adoption and global competitiveness. The essay is a call to balance legitimate safety concerns with policies that sustain innovation, so society doesn’t “turn its back” on technologies that raised living standards.