I’ve been thinking about the Luddites lately.
We’ve inherited a particular story about them: people who feared technology, resisted progress, and tried to stop the inevitable. But I wonder if we’ve misunderstood something important about their concerns.
What if the question was never simply whether technology was good or bad? What if it was about what happens to people, their skills, and their livelihoods when the pursuit of efficiency becomes more important than the things efficiency was supposed to serve?
I think about that a lot when I look at how we use technology today, particularly artificial intelligence.
I’m not against technology. Quite the opposite. I work in technology because I believe in its ability to solve problems, remove unnecessary friction, and help people do things they couldn’t otherwise do. But lately, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with the assumption that doing more necessarily means accomplishing more.
We can generate more content, write more code, produce more reports, create more graphics, and automate more processes than ever before. We can make things faster, cheaper, and more polished.
But are we making them better? Are we solving the right problems? Are we becoming more capable, or simply becoming more dependent on tools that allow us to skip the work of understanding?
There is a difference between using a tool to extend your abilities and using a tool to avoid developing them in the first place.
AI can help a developer understand an unfamiliar system, explore possible solutions, and work more effectively. It can also allow someone to produce code they cannot explain, troubleshoot, or safely maintain. The output might look identical at first. The difference becomes apparent when something breaks.
And I wonder how often we are mistaking the appearance of competence for competence itself.
We are getting very good at producing things. I’m less convinced that we are getting equally good at deciding what is worth producing.
When productivity becomes the goal
This concern extends beyond technology.
Organizations are increasingly capable of measuring activity: how much we produce, how many people we reach, how many campaigns we launch, how many tasks we complete. These measurements can be useful. But they become dangerous when they stop serving a larger purpose and start replacing it.
Imagine an organization that produces more and more content but cannot demonstrate that the content is helping it accomplish its mission. What should happen next?
Ideally, we would stop and ask questions. Are we reaching the right people? Are we solving the right problem? What does the evidence tell us? What should we change?
But what if, instead, we change what we measure?
Sometimes that is the right decision. Metrics can be flawed, incomplete, or poorly suited to the outcomes we actually care about. But changing a measurement is not the same as improving a result. We should be able to explain why a new measure is more meaningful, not simply celebrate it because it looks better.
Otherwise, we risk building organizations that become increasingly productive at demonstrating their own productivity.
The reports look better. The output increases. The activity is undeniable.
But the original question remains unanswered: Is any of this actually working?
What happens to the fundamentals?
There is another cost that is harder to measure.
When technology makes it possible to skip steps, we may gradually lose the ability to perform them. When answers are instantly available, we may become less practiced at asking good questions. When a system does the reasoning for us, we may become less capable of recognizing faulty reasoning. When we can produce something without understanding how it works, we may lose the ability to maintain it, improve it, or recognize when it is wrong.
This isn’t an argument that everyone needs to know everything about every tool they use. No one can understand every layer of a modern technological system. Abstraction is necessary, and specialization is valuable.
The problem is not that we rely on tools. It is that we may stop recognizing the difference between a tool doing work for us and a tool helping us become better at the work.
There is a difference between knowing how to use something and understanding enough to use it responsibly.
And perhaps there is a difference between having access to more information and becoming more knowledgeable.
We can surround ourselves with increasingly sophisticated systems while becoming less capable of questioning them.
Progress toward what?
I keep coming back to the word progress.
We tend to use it as though its meaning is self-evident. Faster is progress. More is progress. Automation is progress. Growth is progress.
But these things describe a direction, not a destination.
A faster process is only an improvement if the process is worth doing. More output is only valuable if the output serves a purpose. Growth is only meaningful relative to what we are trying to grow and why.
Technology can make us more efficient without making us wiser. It can increase our capacity without improving our judgment. It can help us do more while leaving us less certain about whether any of it matters.
The question is not whether we should embrace or reject technological advancement. It is whether we are thinking carefully enough about what we want that advancement to accomplish.
Perhaps the most important skills in an increasingly automated world will not be the ability to generate more, but the ability to discern what matters, understand the fundamentals, evaluate the results, and recognize when we are moving quickly in the wrong direction.
Maybe the lesson of the Luddites is not that we should fear new technology.
Maybe it is that we should be suspicious of any definition of progress that asks us to stop questioning what progress is for.