What the Luddites, the ATM, and the music industry teach long-term investors
The headlines are loud. The record is louder.
The narrative has decided that AI will devastate software companies, their workforces, and by extension, your portfolio. CBS News, CNBC, and Harvard Business Review have all written the obituary.
Nearly 55,000 U.S. layoffs are attributed to AI in 2025 alone, and here’s a twist worth noting: many of those layoffs are being driven not by AI’s actual performance, but by companies anticipating its potential. The tone is equal parts alarm and inevitability, as if the outcome is predestined.
Maybe. But certainty has a habit of making itself look foolish.
The Luddites were right about the pain
In the English textile towns of Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire, between 1811 and 1816, a group of skilled weavers and textile workers took matters into their own hands. They called themselves Luddites, after Ned Ludd, a young apprentice who was rumored to have wrecked a textile machine in a fit of rage back in 1779. There’s no evidence Ludd actually existed, but just like Robin Hood, he became the mythical leader of the movement.
The protesters claimed to be following orders from “General Ludd,” and they smashed power looms across the countryside to save their wages and their way of life.
They weren’t wrong about the short-term pain. The machines were taking their jobs, their wages, and their dignity. The British government responded by making machine-breaking a capital offense. Seventeen men were executed. The movement was crushed.
And yet. Over the following decades, power looms didn’t shrink the textile workforce. They expanded it. Lower costs drove demand, created factories, and built cities. In the decades that followed, those cities created entirely new categories of work that no one had imagined: railway engineers, telegraph operators, and factory managers running workforces of thousands.
The Luddites lost the argument, but it took a full generation for anyone to notice, and by then, most of the original workers were long gone.
The bank tellers didn’t see it coming
Bank teller employment in the United States once peaked at nearly 600,000 jobs. Today, there are roughly half that number, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a further 13% decline by 2034. When ATMs arrived in the 1970s, conventional wisdom was swift and decisive: bank tellers were finished. Why pay a person to do what a machine could do for less? Insightful and absolutely wrong.
As economist James Bessen of Boston University documented, teller employment actually increased as ATM deployment accelerated. ATMs reduced the cost of operating a branch, and banks responded by opening 43% more branches to compete for greater market share. The machine took the routine cash transactions. …
This post was originally published here
