An AI backlash is coming

In the 1810s, English handloom weavers saw their wages collapse as steam-powered looms came for the textile trade. Named after a legendary figure called Ned Ludd, they smashed the new machines and tried to wind the economy back to its older shape. They were the Luddites.

Just over 200 years later, something similar is happening with artificial intelligence. The mood has soured, and it has soured early. The backlash has arrived before the displacement.

A YouGov survey published in January found that only around 25% of people in the UK and US held a positive view of AI. By mid-2025, 66% of Britons and 62% of Americans believed AI would destroy more jobs than it would create. Just 6 or 7% expected it to be a net creator of work.

Stanford's 2026 AI Index tracked the same fall. Only 10% of Americans now say they are more excited than concerned about AI, compared with 56% of AI experts. The people building the technology and the people living with it have stopped agreeing on the basics.

And public opinion turned before any mass layoffs. The question worth asking now is what happens when the displacement actually starts.

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The first is politics. In March 2026, Senator Bernie Sanders posted a YouTube video in which he interviewed Anthropic's Claude chatbot about the dangers of AI. The video has since been watched over 4 million times.

Days later, Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act, a bill that would freeze new AI data centre construction until Congress passes safeguards for workers, consumers and the environment.

According to Sanders, more than 100 local communities across 12 US states have already passed their own data centre moratoriums. The bill is unlikely to clear Congress, but anti-AI sentiment has crossed from tech commentary into populist politics.

The second strand is creative work. An analysis of 180 million job postings found computer graphic artists saw a 33% drop in listings in 2025, on top of a 12% fall in 2024. Photography and writing roles each fell 28%. Cornell research found freelance demand dropped 20 to 50% for AI-substitutable skills.

The third strand is the bubble narrative. An MIT Media Lab report found 95% of organisations were getting zero return on their generative AI spend. A National Bureau of Economic Research study published in February 2026 reported that 90% of firms saw no impact of AI on workplace productivity.

In March 2026, Anthropic published a study of AI's actual impact on the labour market. Their researchers found that in fields like business, finance, computer science and law, AI can in theory cover more than 80% of tasks. Real adoption sits well below that.

There has been no systematic rise in unemployment among workers in AI-exposed jobs since ChatGPT launched in late 2022. One early signal stands out though. Hiring rates for workers aged 22 to 25 in exposed occupations have dropped by around 14% compared with 2022.

Young workers are not being pushed out. The door is creaking shut. Because they never held those jobs in the first place, the loss does not show up in unemployment figures.

The Anthropic researchers named a scenario worth taking seriously: a Great Recession for white-collar workers. During the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis, US unemployment doubled from 5% to 10%. A comparable doubling has not happened in AI-exposed work, but their analysis suggests it could.

The handloom weavers offer a cautionary parallel. Their wages fell from 21 shillings a week in 1802 to under 9 shillings by 1817. If AI follows a similar pattern of gradual wage pressure rather than dramatic layoffs, the pain will accumulate long before it reaches headline unemployment.

There is a reasonable case that some of the disruption is self-inflicted. Harvard Business Review reported in early 2026 that companies were laying off workers in anticipation of AI's impact rather than because AI was performing the work. The losses were real, but driven by expectation rather than demonstrated capability.

Researchers also disagree on what is happening. A Washington Post analysis in March 2026 noted that one Stanford study found AI was bleeding jobs from young workers in exposed roles, while research from the Economic Innovation Group concluded the opposite. The experts cannot agree, which suggests the picture is genuinely unsettled.

History points to a more manageable outcome. Technology has rarely produced the kind of sustained mass unemployment that critics fear. The working week has shortened over time, younger people spend more years in education, and entirely new industries appear that would have been unimaginable a generation earlier.

The Luddites were right that machines would destroy their specific livelihoods. They were wrong that stopping the machines was possible or good for society overall. From the mid 19th century living standards soared. But that long-run gain was cold comfort to the weavers whose wages halved in their own lifetimes. This lack of immediate productivity upside was labelled the Engels Pause.

The question for our generation is whether we repeat the Engels Pause, with decades of rising productivity captured by capital while workers absorb the disruption, or whether we manage the transition before it reaches breaking point. If unemployment suddenly rises to double digit %, then there really will be a rage against the machine.