The tension reflected in Russell's description of automated machines—they’d either destroy us or redeem us, liber­ate us or enslave us—has a long history. The same tension has run through popular reactions to factory machinery since the start of the Industrial Revolution more than two centuries ago. While many of our forebears celebrated the arrival of mechanized production, seeing it as a symbol of progress and a guarantor of prosperity, others wor­ried that machines would steal their jobs and even their souls. Ever since, the story of technology has been one of rapid, often disorient­ing change. Thanks to the ingenuity of our inventors and entrepre­neurs, hardly a decade has passed without the arrival of new, more elaborate, and more capable machinery. Yet our ambivalence toward these fabulous creations, creations of our own hands and minds, has remained a constant. It’s almost as if in looking at a machine we see, if only dimly, something about ourselves that we don’t quite trust.

In his 1776 masterwork The Wealth of Nations, the foundational text of free enterprise, Adam Smith praised the great variety of “very pretty machines” that manufacturers were installing to “facilitate and abridge labour.” By enabling “one man to do the work of many,” he predicted, mechanization would provide a great boost to industrial productivity. Factory owners would earn more profits, which they would then invest in expanding their operations—building more plants, buying more machines, hiring more employees. Each indi­vidual machine’s abridgment of labor, far from being bad for workers, would actually stimulate demand for labor in the long run.

Other thinkers embraced and extended Smith’s assessment. Thanks to the higher productivity made possible by labor-saving equipment, they predicted, jobs would multiply, wages would go up, and prices of goods would come down. Workers would have some extra cash in their pockets, which they would use to purchase prod­ucts from the manufacturers that employed them. That would provide yet more capital for industrial expansion. In this way, mechanization would help set in motion a virtuous cycle, accelerating a society’s economic growth, expanding and spreading its wealth, and bring­ing to its people what Smith had termed “convenience and luxury.”

This view of technology as an economic elixir seemed, happily, to be borne out by the early history of industrialization, and it became a fixture of economic theory. The idea wasn’t compelling only to early capitalists and their scholarly brethren. Many social reformers applauded mechanization, viewing it as the best hope for raising the urban masses out of poverty and servitude.

Economists, capitalists, and reformers could afford to take the long view. With the workers themselves, that wasn’t the case. Even a temporary abridgment of labor could pose a real and immediate threat to their livelihoods. The installation of new factory machines put plenty of people out of jobs, and it forced others to exchange interesting, skilled work for the tedium of pulling levers and press­ing foot-pedals. In many parts of Britain during the 18th and the early 19th century, skilled workers took to sabotaging the new machinery as a way to defend their jobs, their trades, and their communities. “Machine-breaking,” as the movement came to be called, was not simply an attack on technological progress. It was a concerted attempt by tradesmen to protect their ways of life, which were very much bound up in the crafts they practiced, and to secure their economic and civic autonomy. “If the workmen disliked cer­tain machines,” writes the historian Malcolm Thomis, drawing on contemporary accounts of the uprisings, “it was because of the use to which they were being put, not because they were machines or because they were new.”