Why? They were right. The advent of mechanization in textile factories led to a profound weakening of labor and a steep decline in working conditions generally.

They were demanding worker protections both in terms of safety and livability and they didn't get them. They were demanding fair wages and were correctly concerned that the machine operators would be so thoroughly subservient to the machine owners that they would never again have significant power over their own profession.

And again, the were right. That's what happened.

All technological advancements have caused changes, many have made entire professions obsolete.

One could even be allowed to imagine that science itself ought to have put priests out of a job, yet that hasn’t happened yet either.

“AI” is a generic term that’s being thrown around a lot.

There’s a huge distance from today’s AI, which at its best is generative AI based on large language models, to actual General AI that is able to learn, understand, and adapt.

Sure, you can train a language model, but it doesn’t make it “smarter” in the same instance.