The term “Luddite” originates from early 19th-century England, where textile workers, fearing for their livelihoods, protested and sometimes destroyed weaving machinery that threatened to displace their jobs.

Though often portrayed as anti-progress, the original Luddites were primarily concerned about losing work and fair treatment as industry transformed.

This distinction is important because modern “Luddites” are generally not opposed to technology itself but to the manner and impacts of its adoption, especially regarding job security, workplace power dynamics, and the shifting distribution of wealth and influence .

In the 21st century, resistance commonly arises amid fears that artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation will make many roles—such as factory labor, clerical work, and even professional jobs like accounting—obsolete.

A striking example is seen in parts of the manufacturing sector where the replacement of assembly workers by robots has caused significant workforce displacement and anxiety.

Some contemporary employees, such as experienced journalists or traditional retail staff, also express skepticism or resistance when digital transformation initiatives fundamentally alter workflows or value systems.

Not only is the pace of change intimidating, it often demands ongoing retraining, adaptation, and acquisition of entirely new skill sets, which can be deeply unsettling for those unprepared for lifelong learning .

Psychologically, this resistance is rooted in fear of the unknown, anxiety about diminished job status, and loss of professional identity, while socially, it is manifested in concerns over reduced human interaction and eroded workplace communities—exacerbated by remote work and digital platforms .

A further source of resistance is the perception that technology serves organizational efficiency at the cost of individual creativity, autonomy, or non-quantifiable values .

The term “Luddite” originates from early 19th-century England, where textile workers, fearing for their livelihoods, protested and sometimes destroyed weaving machinery that threatened to displace their jobs.

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Content: Does AI make the arts poorer?
The real difference between the rich and the poor is the human mind.
▲ Since we have AI tools, we can do things quickly and well with a simple prompt, and the cost is low. (Illustration / Reuters)
2nd / Podcaster
I had a friend who had been unemployed for a while and asked me if I had a job for him to do, such as simple things like keeping an account and sorting out documents.
I said, if you asked me two years earlier, there must be, but unfortunately not now.
In the past, those chores took time, since the AI tool, as long as the simple prompt can be completed, the monthly fee is only a few hundred yuan, two or three hundred hourly wage students may not do so well.
He listened to me, didn ’ t believe it, and was curious to ask me how I use AI now.
In fact, the application is too broad and too complicated. To make him understand it as soon as possible, I cite my entire workflow as an example.
For example, when writing an article, in the stage of collecting materials, AI helps me to make notes of books / meetings / lectures / courses with speech, and the content is accurate and the grammar is strict. It can also be converted into various forms of charts, different lengths and various articles.
At the writing stage, I will discuss with AI what different topics can be cut into perspective, such as this article I want to know how AI is changing our society, ask it to help me summarize the main views on the Internet, and I will continue to ask for some details, and also ask it to grab the latest data for me.
Next, before po comes to the community, ask it to help me modify the typos and punctuation, the correction only takes a few seconds, and the text creation is basically completed.
I asked my friend, do you think you can do better, faster and cheaper than AI?
▲ AI can help users to take notes with voice, and the content of speech to text is accurate and the grammar is strict. It can also be converted into various forms of charts, different lengths and various articles.
(Chart / CFP)
Next, the image creation.
Now many devices, including WebCam and Monocular, the camera can lock the portrait to move in small amplitude, and even deliberately create a natural hand shake, self-portrait images are becoming more and more dependent on others.
Before the oral video, mainly rely on improvisation or reading, the former plays subtitles until the hand is broken, the latter has to get a reader to adjust the speed, now AI recognition subtitles are very common, the reader also evolved into the script will follow my words run (used readers will know how convenient this is), greatly speeding up the efficiency of recording videos.
It is also a technology derived from AI speech recognition: AI editing. Although it is not completely free from manual work, the editor is now editing by reading the text, without the need to listen with ears, which saves a lot of effort.
Music and images can be generated by AI, saving a lot of time to find materials and reducing the risk of copyright infringement.
As for the job that my friends are looking for, such as document processing and answering e-mail, I just write a SOP file to feed the robot, and it can do it flawlessly, and there is no need to rest for 24 hours.
It doesn ’ t matter if what is said above is not understood, in simple terms, I used to find two or three more people to deal with the process of chores, and it was replaced by AI, and AI did well and fast.
After all, it was all simple work.
▲ Document processing, e-mail and other things, as long as you write a SOP file to feed the robot, it can do flawless, and 24 hours without rest.
(Chart / CFP)
My friend is angry after hearing it.
I said, but I still need someone to help me, because I ’ m saving a lot of time now, have more capacity, and have the opportunity to make more money.
Do you do business sponsorship? Do you write creative scripts that are popular with young people? Do you have experience in IP marketing?
He was frustrated and said that he would not be those, as if he could only be eliminated.
Then he complained to me, saying that Taiwan's industry is serious, only the technology industry can make money, and other people live in deep water.
In fact, every technological innovation is like this, the British textile industry in the 19th century industrialization, a group of textile workers are also very angry at their loss of work, in the factory to destroy the loom.
These people are called Luddites. Now Luddites have become synonymous with opposition to technological progress. Most people also know that Luddites are marginal beings who will eventually die.
But it is obviously not accurate to attribute the fierce competition to the struggle for literature. In the example above, I am also a writer, but my property has leapt with the industrial revolution.
The difference is that I did two things: the first is the investment trend, and the second is that I treat AI as extremely cheap capital and use it to make money.
But I have taken advantage of resources, like I do not mix badly, will mix better, and mixed badly, will only mix worse.
Times change too fast, now this environment can not guarantee that you listen carefully to the classroom to teach those textbooks out of the society to eat, talent needs a flexible brain, as well as a variety of information judgment, to keep up with the pace of faster and faster technological development.
Then it is true that some people can not do, some people from the past to the present, all want to do the simplest job, they either can not find a job, or they have to get a lower salary than the robot.
▲ In the era of rapid technological changes, the advantages of language have been greatly weakened.
(Image from Google Translate)
In fact, education must be reformed as soon as possible, we need new departments, abolish some old departments, and now it seems like the pure language department of the college is really harming students, ensuring that they graduate and lose their jobs. (This sentence is easy to be misunderstood, it seems that I am belittling a particular department, I am not necessary.) And...
In my experience as a minor in Japanese at university, although I can also study culture and history, the advantages of language have been greatly weakened, and the teaching syllabus must be adjusted.)
The gap between the rich and the poor is inevitable, and policies can only try to avoid too many poor people, otherwise there will be social unrest.
Put on the beautiful idea of science fiction, before the civil unrest of mankind, I hope that robots will take care of our food like mothers.
Can you think about it? – I love this post.
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Though often portrayed as anti-progress, the original Luddites were primarily concerned about losing work and fair treatment as industry transformed.

Title:

Content: Brian Merchant, author: “Luddites are more dangerous to the rich than Robin Hood”

The Luddites have been a great historical resource. Any showy enemy of anything that looked like technological progress has been called a Luddite. Today with generative artificial intelligence and its critics, the word has been revived. The author and journalist Brian Merchant (Iowa City, USA, 1983) saw it coming and has written a book that reviews the Luddite revolt in England at the beginning of the 19th century and its similarities with current technologies: Blood in the Machine (Blood in the Machine, currently without a planned edition in Spanish) thus explores the origins of the current revolt against big technology.

Although the book has appeared in the midst of the AI hype, Merchant began his research a decade ago: “Uber was growing and it was beginning to be seen that it was having a hard impact on taxi drivers, I heard the term Luddite from the pro-Uber sector and wrote an article titled You don't understand anything about Luddites”. Now in his book he remembers that the Luddite revolt was a labor struggle, not anti-technology, at a time when unions were prohibited. In a conversation with EL PAÍS from his residence in Los Angeles, Merchant clarifies the historical impact of the Luddites and the possible similar struggles that are being played today in Silicon Valley.

1. The Luddites were not against progress

The labor revolt over the loss of rights was more important than the destruction of textile machines: “The biggest mistake about the Luddites is to say that they were against technology and progress,” says Merchant. “They were against certain technologies because they recognized the way in which they were going to be used in their context against them as workers. It was a labor movement, against poverty, not anti-technology. The British Government began to mold them in this way almost immediately, it was keen to mock the Luddites and present the argument that they were against progress. It is very similar to how today people in positions of power in technology companies accuse those who complain about poor working conditions. It's the same story for 200 years.”

The book quotes a phrase from historian Eric Hobsbawm that explains this stage: “It was collective bargaining through riots.” According to Merchant, this tactic in a workers' struggle was very powerful for two reasons: “First, it was symbolic because everyone understood that what they were destroying was not just a machine. It was also the specific machine used to transfer wealth from the workers to the employer. Second, it was useful because they destroyed the equipment that businessmen needed.”

2. Why Robin Hood is better accepted than Ned Ludd

Ned Ludd was a legendary character. No one knows for sure if he existed. It was the legend of a teenager who would have broken the first machines at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In 1811, rebellious workers used his legendary name to sign letters and further scare: “Ludd probably never existed. But the incarnation of it would become a mascot, an organizational tool, a wink: a powerful 19th-century meme,” Merchant writes.

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Ludd lived near Nottingham (United Kingdom), like another legendary figure who has been better treated by history. There must be a reason, says Merchant: “The Luddites organized a popular and powerful rebellion. People wrote popular songs about them. They were like Robin Hood. But it is interesting that Robin Hood has endured as a positive light, while the Luddites have not. He suggests that the myth of Ned Ludd is in some ways more dangerous to the elites and the wealthy than that of Robin Hood, which is a little more nebulous and open. The Luddites say: go ahead and break the machines of your oppression. Robin Hood says: steal from the rich and give to the poor. “I think that’s a little more tolerable.”

3. How are they similar to today's problems?

The background of the book is that the history of the Luddites is similar to what happens today in Silicon Valley, where a small group of corporations dominate new technologies. “The way technologies are developed has basically not changed. You have a handful of people with access to enough capital or political influence to be able to build a factory and use automation technologies. “Back then, the most aggressive owners didn’t ask anyone how to find a way to make this a win-win.”

Merchant has received criticism for equating the great businessmen of 19th century England with 21st century America. But there are details that he does not see that far away: “The technology development process is in some ways even more undemocratic today than then. There is this immense pool of capital available to Silicon Valley innovators through venture capital. Uber wasn't profitable for 10 years, but they had access to that capital. Did anyone really like that? Did it work for workers and delivery people? Nothing mattered, they just had more money and moved on.”

See also  Just the mystery

This distinction is important because modern “Luddites” are generally not opposed to technology itself but to the manner and impacts of its adoption, especially regarding job security, workplace power dynamics, and the shifting distribution of wealth and influence .

In the 21st century, resistance commonly arises amid fears that artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation will make many roles—such as factory labor, clerical work, and even professional jobs like accounting—obsolete.

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Why robots will take your job, and what to do - panic or rejoice
Why robots will take away your profession.
Increasingly, you can hear about the challenges posed by automation and cybernization to existing professions today.
And we are talking not only about unmanned vehicles and chatbots replacing call center operators, but also about programs that can calculate bank loans and insurance rates, depriving analysts and, moreover, neural networks that claim to compete with highly qualified and creative employees.
Exemption from routine or danger of unemployment?
A cause for concern or long-awaited freedom?
History of the problem
Mechanisms of ancient times.
Competition has always existed – professions disappeared and arose, people fought for jobs with each other and with technology, philosophers and economists built forecasts and tried to predict the prospects and are still doing it.
For example, you can assess how much automation threatens your profession and how quickly robots will replace you by using Will Robots Take My Job.
Aristotle was the first to think about the possibility of transferring “work ” to machines.
In the first book of his Politics, he suggested that they could evolve to such an extent that the need for human labor would disappear.
For him, quite in line with the views of work at the time, as something distracting from participation in public life and personal development, this was an extremely optimistic forecast.
“Work ” in ancient Greece was considered to be the lot of the lower classes, and the mechanisms would only liberate slaves, considered nothing but“ machines of flesh and blood. ”
The reorientation of the economy to the export of wool led to the introduction of a policy of “enclosures ”.
The real competition of a sufficiently large mass of people technology for the first time was only more than a millennium and a half later in England.
At first, the reorientation of the economy to wool exports led to the introduction of a policy of “fencing ”, in which landlords expelled farmers from the fields in order to free the territory for sheep grazing, which led to the first massive surge of“ unemployment ” – albeit not in the current sense.
The then arising vagrancy and poverty contemporary of these events, the Chancellor of England and philosopher Thomas More described the famous "sheep ate people."
However, after a few decades it became clear that no – not eaten.
The former peasants were absorbed by the growing cities, where they found a new job in textile manufactures, processing the same wool obtained from shearing sheep.
This was the first example of how, by taking away one thing, “technology ” is able to offer something different.
But we must admit: the process of urbanization was painful, the work that replaced the cultivation of land turned out to be hard and dirty, the gap with the traditional way of life was very traumatic, and the population of England as a result of hunger and the fight against vagrancy, which was conducted, including the use of gallows, decreased, according to some estimates by 30% (to understand the scale - the Soviet Union during the Second World War lost "only" 15% of the population).
Workers in a textile factory, late 18th century.
The next episode of the confrontation between people and technology occurred a century later in the same field of light industry - the invention in 1785 by Edmund Cartwright of a mechanical loom increased labor productivity forty times.
Jobs that had just been lost were once again lost.
But again temporarily – after spinning machines, others appeared and all of them demanded new resources, and their extraction – new types of labor.
Manufactures were replaced by factories, and muscle strength by the power of steam obtained from coal.
Machine Destroyers
The Luddite movement.
This time, the changes that occurred were met with bayonets - there was a movement of Luddites.
Sabotage of work and direct action: attacks on factories and the destruction of machines caused a harsh reaction of the state, which sent troops to suppress the “army of Ned Ludd ”.
It is characteristic that no one at the top bothered to convey to the workers the idea that there will still be work for them, even if not the one to which they had time to get used.
The fact is that the “top ” themselves at that time did not think too much about how all this was arranged, and people were perceived as expendable material, while the inertia of consciousness of ordinary workers who had just recovered from the transition from the agrarian to the urban way of life was also very high.
The First Industrial Revolution at the beginning of the 18th century.
The theoretical basis for the interaction of technological innovations and the masses of labor began to be summed up only by economists and philosophers of the middle of the XIX century.
They were the first to suggest that the disappearance of certain types of work in the process of technological development entails the emergence of new ones, and “work ” as a whole is not something final, which may be“ not enough ”.
The First Industrial Revolution was in full swing and the optimism of its apologists only grew stronger over time.
By the end of the century, it seemed that progress would eliminate not only social problems and contradictions, but could also rid humanity of wars.
However, while some spoke of the "Luddite delusion", others spoke of the "enslavement of the masses" and the need to hand over to the "factory workers", predicting that as long as the instruments of production are in the hands of the big proprietors, their employees will remain disenfranchised, and the lack of social security will cause explosions of unemployment at any moment.
Second wave
The Second Industrial Revolution.
The word “unemployment ” came into being at that time.
The fact is that a peasant working in the fields or a craftsman who provides for the needs of himself and the small surrounding community could not face something like this - he himself formed his employment.
When the scheme of selling labor on a strict schedule became mass within the framework of fulfilling a strictly regulated set of duties, the challenge arose to lose such an opportunity.
The Second Industrial Revolution was on the way.
The basics of streaming production were laid at the end of the 19th century, and by the beginning of the 20th century, the combination of Ford ’ s marketing strategy (he invented that the car was not an attribute of the elites, but a mass need) and the conveyor he introduced led to new changes that went beyond factories and factories.
On January 18, 1886, the first car invented by Karl Benz was released.
It was the emergence of technology on the streets of cities that brought a new wave of competition.
Look at the photos of the streets of the beginning of the last century: here they are dammed with carts, among which a lonely clumsy car is trying to maneuver, but ten years later, the only horse frightened by the roar of engines and sobbing of klaxons is clutching to the sidewalks.
Here it will be important to note how unpredictable this jump became: “At the beginning of the 20th century, the French Academy warned about an environmental disaster, which inevitably should lead to the accumulation of horse manure associated with the development of horse-drawn transport in Paris, ” recalls, reasoning about the prediction of the future Stanislav Lem.
However, note: in those regions where human labor is cheaper, technology can not replace it, as we are shown, for example, rickshaws, until recently used their own muscle power and only with a sharp drop in the cost of small vehicles motorized.
A more modern example is “computer rickshaws ” – hundreds of thousands of low-skilled Chinese, hacked captchas all day, because their work costs less than the introduction of scripts.
Technological unemployment
The line of the American unemployed during the Great Depression.
In the 1930s, Maynard Keynes, who gave the world the theory of the “social state ”, from the attempts of which many economies have not recovered so far, introduced the term“ technological unemployment ” into mass circulation.
Since then, the debate about whether the introduction of new technological solutions and opportunities can create a long-term job crisis or whether everything is limited to repurposing, when obsolete professions are replaced by new ones, and it is enough for people to change or improve their skills.
Until the end of the last decade, most experts were inclined to believe that “technological unemployment ” is always a temporary phenomenon, leading to the renewal and improvement of the professionalism of workers.
Mechanical labor was replaced by physical labor, the operator - a profession more status and highly paid than the worker, the reduction of costs leads to the release of time - these are the main theses sounded then.
Pessimistic views remained largely the domain of marginals, such as Theodore Kaczynski, famous for his terrorist struggle against progress under the name of Unabomber and primitive philosophers.
Pessimism
The first full-fledged computer in the USSR BESM-1.
Cautious voices expressing doubts about the correctness of this approach sounded even then.
And if in one of his speeches in 1962, President Kennedy said that “if people are able to invent new machines that take away their jobs, even more so are able to invent new jobs, ” then two years later, a letter from scientists and activists concerned with the problem of technological unemployment, sent to his successor, Lyndon Johnson, stated that“ a revolution in cybernetics will create a separate nation of poor, unskilled unemployed. ”.
Theorists disputed the impossibility of long-term unemployment, as did Martin Ford in the book “Light in the Tunnel: Automation, Acceleration of Technology and the Economy of the Future ” or Marshall Brains in“ Robotic Nation ”.
Gasne-Peter Martin and Harald Schumann, in their Global Trap, describe a society in which the labor of twenty percent of the population is enough for the world economy to continue to develop.
There are those who see it as a threat and a danger, like Paul Krugmann in his article “Sympathy for the Luddites ” or Frey and Osborne in“ The Future of Work. ”
In addition, in practice, it turned out that technology is not so freeing up time – for example, representatives of professions requiring high qualifications, at least in the United States today work more than 30 years ago, and technologies that provide remote access to working tools allow them not to break away from professional tasks and in their “free time ”.
It is also important that new jobs, as it was noticed at the beginning of the XXI century, are created not so much by technology as by the change in the way of life that they entail.
So in the mid-2010s, nine out of ten working people are employed in professions that did not exist a century earlier, but only 5% of the jobs that appeared from 1993 to 2013 are in high-tech areas, such as IT or telecom.
However, the question is whether this does not mean that indirectly they still arise due to technologies that provide an opportunity for development for the service sector.
Is it bad?
A shot from the film "I, Robot" (2004).
Harvard economics professor Lawrence Summers, who previously served as U.S. Treasury Secretary, said in 2014 that he no longer believes that automation will always create new jobs and that it is not some hypothetical possibility in the future; it is something that is emerging now.
In his opinion, the changes will be very global and will lead to mass unemployment not only among low-skilled employees, but also for “blue ” and“ white ” collar workers, because “there are many reasons to think that the software revolution will be even more significant than the agrarian one. ”
The robot prepares food.
However, this is what allows us to look to the future with optimism.
Summers ’ s thought of the meaning of the digital revolution echoes the position of futurologist Alvin Toffler.
As early as 1970, in his book Future Shock, he wrote that by comparing the Digital Revolution with the Industrial Revolution, we downplay its significance and it would be more correct to draw a parallel with the exit of mankind from caves and the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and cattle breeding.
Potentially, this means that humanity is on the verge of an unprecedented, unknown written history civilizational leap of colossal proportions.
And, due to the fact that the speed of changes in the world has increased many times and now, the fact that in the case of the end of the Stone Age, took millennia, is being carried out in front of one, a maximum of a couple or three generations, this breakthrough, of course, will be painful.
However, having reviewed the usual way of life, the attitude to it and their values, will not humanity be able to break through to the conditions of life, previously even unimaginable.
"Terminator 2: Judgment Day" (1991).
We are easily accustomed to such changes in “work ” as freelancing and remote work, quite calmly came to a repeated change of professions, instead of a continuous, decades-long“ career ” and even were able to include them in your life, saying that this is the way to find yourself.
So is it not time to begin to accustom ourselves to the idea that, as economic historian Robert Skidelsky said, “Sooner or later we will run out of work ”?
After all, freelancing and remote employment are about freedom, about leaving the “office slavery ” and searching for the way of life that is convenient for us.
Yes, to get used to the idea that the traditional “work ” is over and now we will have to independently invent what to occupy ourselves will not be easy.
It will require responsibility, but it is freedom.
Isn ’ t it time for us, joyfully exclaiming “Glory to the robots! ”, to go in search of our place in the new world?
Why robots will take away your profession.
The fact that it is not only about robots, but also about the “work ” itself and the possibility of life without it, about the risks associated with negative scenarios of confrontation between people and machines and the possibilities of overcoming them, we will talk in the next parts of the cycle.
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A striking example is seen in parts of the manufacturing sector where the replacement of assembly workers by robots has caused significant workforce displacement and anxiety.

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Content: ContributorsPublishersAdvertisers

There’s a Mental Health Crisis At Work Because Life Is Changing Too Fast

TIME
 2 days ago

In Oct. 2022, United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released guidelines for promoting employee mental health at work. Murthy’s team developed the framework in response to alarming decreases in employee wellbeing. For instance, 76% of workers in 2021 reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, a 17% increase over the previous two years alone. Excessive stress costs us nearly $200 billion in medical payments each year, and more than 100 thousand unnecessary deaths. At work today, we are too unwell, too anxious, and too overwhelmed.

We hear, in parallel, about the changing nature of work—the rise of automation and the constancy of change. Volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity, snowballing faster and larger every day, threaten our wellbeing and productivity. There is no precedent for either the pace or the type of change we face at work today—what we call the twin trials. Yet, few, if any, approaches acknowledge and design around this new reality as a major contributor to diminished wellbeing.

Read More: In Some Workplaces, It’s Now OK Not to Be OK

Successfully navigating this pace and this type of uncertainty (not simply surviving, but also taking full advantage of it to thrive) requires a unique set of emotional, social, and cognitive skills. Understanding these two dimensions of challenge can prepare us to respond.

The whitewater world of work

About seven years ago, our colleague, futurist and former Chief Scientist at Xerox John Seely Brown, began describing this phenomenon as the “ whitewater ” world of work. “For my parents,” he says, “the typical career trajectory was like a steamship’s—fire up the engines and full speed ahead…But today’s graduates need be more like whitewater kayakers, quickly analyzing and responding to an ever-changing flow, knowing and trusting themselves so they won’t panic.”

If we are to regain our bearings, we must understand what we are up against. First and foremost: Just how fast are these rapids? How quickly do we need to be prepared to paddle?

By most estimates, the year 2020 still represents the first chapter of our new world of work. Job displacement today, at the beginning of this transformation, is moving two to four times as fast as it was at the height of industrialization in 1900. And that pace is only accelerating. As of 2018, an estimated 71% of total labor tasks were performed by humans, and 29% by machines. The World Economic Forum estimates that by 2025 , this will shift to 50% of labor performed by humans and 50% by machines.

How about the individual experience of that change? Said differently: “Just how fast is the change that I will personally experience?”

Industrialization brought change generation by generation. The whitewater world of work brings change so rapidly we will feel it within each generation, several times over. Hard skills already expire every few years. The World Economic Forum, which tracks the evolution of market demand for specific skills, estimates we will have to wholly reinvent ourselves every 10 years. We will learn new job skills, only to see them fall into disuse, or transfer to machines. We will be reinventing ourselves over and over again. And our children and our children’s children can expect to do the same.

If we acknowledge this reality and take it to heart, the project of building wellbeing at work is not about getting through any one era or any one change. It’s about being ready for all of the changes to come.

The nature of change is different than we’ve known, too

Not only is the pace of change dramatically faster today, the change itself is of a different type than we have known in the past. This complex type of change first came to be of interest in military and policy circles in the late 20th century. The acronym VUCA, for example, so often used today to describe our business environment, was originally coined by military leaders to describe the unpredictability of the changes triggered by the end of the Cold War. Soldiers had to be prepared for:

  • Volatility: Unexpected, unstable challenges of unknown duration
  • Uncertainty: Unpredictable events with potential for surprise
  • Complexity: An overwhelming number of interconnected variables influencing events
  • Ambiguity: Opacity of cause and effect driving events

Many leadership training outlets offer VUCA-based tools to help leaders succeed in our world of work.

About a decade ahead of VUCA, planners generated the related concept of “wicked problems.” By contrast to the simpler problems of mathematics or games like chess, wicked problems are difficult to solve because of incomplete or contradictory information or changing requirements. Wicked problems by definition have multiple causes and lack a single “right” answer. Terrorism, poverty, and global warming are all examples of wicked problems.

The technology furnishing our daily dose of VUCA and wicked problems extends to all industries and forums. It sits in our homes and in our offices, enabling information sharing and faster work. Today, there are about 5 billion people online. That’s 5 billion points of origin, 5 billion points of mutation. Each of us sits amidst these billions of ripples every day, deciding which to attend to, which to ignore, and which might signal a life-altering shift we must get ahead of.

In the face of this sort of volatile, impracticable change, we feel fear. Nauseated at best, terrified at worst. Humbled by the complexity we have created but can no longer control.

The psychological toll of whitewater

Whitewater is not for the faint of heart.

We are, all of us, losing and regaining equilibrium with new tools, new markets, new intelligence quarterly. We know, today, much more about the negative consequences of these conditions for our health than we knew in labor transformations past.

Employment instability, for example, and lack of job control—common by-products of VUCA— produce psychological disorders, poor health outcomes, and hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year . Actual unemployment has worse consequences still. When we lose work, our physical and emotional health tank : Blood pressure , arthritis, and heart attacks increase significantly, as does depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide.

Another major risk is that automation has profound implications for human loneliness. More of us will spend our days with “co-bots” rather than people. Remote work causes social isolation , and rates of loneliness in the U.S. have doubled since the 1980s. Loneliness is associated with higher rates of depression . It’s more harmful than obesity to our health, and about as bad for us, in terms of mortality risk, as smoking a pack of cigarettes per day.

Right up until the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies remained unconvinced that the new world of work was threatening our health. The pandemic shattered this illusion. The dramatic increases in mental health needs among employees as a result of COVID-19 created a crisis for those in charge of organizational health. Employees found themselves referred to unprepared, overwhelmed service centers. Some companies tried to offer support to those they had laid off; most companies were too preoccupied trying to figure out how to help the workers still on payroll.

Our employers, just like all of us, are at a loss. We did not evolve to work in the VUCA of whitewater, and yet here we are. We know that if we do not take action, many will suffer. We can continue to do exactly what we did with our mental health response to COVID-19—wait until the damage is done, and respond with palliation.

Alternatively, we can make use of our unique advantage, namely: Modern scientific knowledge of how to flourish in uncertainty. What positive behavioral scientists have learned in the last 30 years about the psychological drivers of wellbeing and how to build them offers us hope today of weathering the coming storm. Without this science, we would remain vulnerable to psychological suffering. With this science, we have the opportunity to not only avoid harm, but also to grow stronger.

Adapted Excerpt from Tomorrowmind: Thriving at Work with Resilience, Creativity, and Connection—Now and in an Uncertain Future by Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin E.P. Seligman, published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2023 by Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin E.P. Seligman. All rights reserved.

Some contemporary employees, such as experienced journalists or traditional retail staff, also express skepticism or resistance when digital transformation initiatives fundamentally alter workflows or value systems.

Title:

Content: Wednesday, 10 January 2024 02: 51 GMT
The culture of growth is declining.
Is the West pulling itself into the fall?
(MENAFN- Al-Bayan)
The Industrial Revolution was one of the most important events in human history, with technological breakthroughs, over the course of a few decades, honing economic output out of a centuries-old bottom and soaring high in human populations, living standards and life expectancy.
Vital as it is, there is still considerable disagreement as to why it all came about, when and where it began.
One of the most compelling arguments has come to mind by Robert Allen, the American economic historian, who argues that Britain ’ s successes in trade in the 16th and 17th centuries raised wages and lowered energy costs, creating powerful incentives to replace labor and mechanize manufacturing processes with energy and capital.
Others emphasize the role played by institutions in the United Kingdom, while some consider innovative ideas, as a result of increased interactions between growing and densely populated populations.
Another interesting theory is that economic historian Joel Mucker, in his 2016 book The Culture of Growth, argues that broader cultural change paved the way for the Industrial Revolution.
Prominent British thinkers, such as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, advocated a progressive view of the world centered on the idea of the importance of science and experimentation in increasing human well-being.
Although convincing, until recently, Mucker ’ s theory was nothing but a theory.
But an impressive paper published last month by a group of economists demonstrates this argument.
The researchers analyzed the content of 173,031 books printed in England between 1500 and 1900, and tracked the frequency of changes in the terms used, using them as evidence of the cultural concepts that prevailed.
Researchers found a marked increase in the use of terms related to progress and innovation, beginning in the early 17th century.
This supports the idea that "cultural evolution in the orientation towards scientific potential partly explains the British Industrial Revolution and its economic breakthrough."
To see if that applied to other countries, she adapted and extended their analysis to include Spain, which fought economic competition with Britain until the 17th century but lagged behind.
Using the data of millions of digitized books in the Google Gram project, I found that the boom in discussions about progress in British books occurred almost two centuries before the boom in Spain, reflecting the trends of economic development in both countries.
It ’ s not just about people talking about progress as their countries move forward, culture developed in both countries before growth accelerated, but the discovery of the important roles language and culture play in stimulating economic development has had a profound impact on the West today.
As long as the line of analysis is straight up to the present day, a startling scene appears to us.
In the past 60 years, the West has been moving away from a culture of progress and towards a culture of caution, anxiety and risk-aversion, with economic growth slowing in parallel over the same period.
The frequency of use of terms related to progress, improvement, and the future has decreased by about 25% since the 1960s, while the use of terms related to threats, risks, and anxiety has become many times more common.
It may not be a coincidence that the simultaneous use of language associated with caution is growing, but rather an equal and opposite force that works against growth and progress.
Roxandra Teslow, one of a growing group of writers focusing on progress and its relationship to science, economics and politics, believes that the growing skepticism of technology and the rise of zero-sum thinking in contemporary society is one of the defining ideological challenges of our time today.
Rebalancing priorities, from timeless progress to caution, may be seen by some as a good thing, but a catastrophic mistake.
Along with economic growth, we have been driven to advance modern medicine, longer and healthier lives, abundant food supplies, a significant reduction in poverty rates, and more and less expensive renewable energy.
Therefore, the challenges facing our world today can be solved by focusing more on progress, not reducing it.
Collective conflicts, exploitation and suffering have dominated the pre-industrial world, and if we want to avoid decadence, the champions of innovation, growth and abundance must overcome the preachers of doom.
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Not only is the pace of change intimidating, it often demands ongoing retraining, adaptation, and acquisition of entirely new skill sets, which can be deeply unsettling for those unprepared for lifelong learning .

Psychologically, this resistance is rooted in fear of the unknown, anxiety about diminished job status, and loss of professional identity, while socially, it is manifested in concerns over reduced human interaction and eroded workplace communities—exacerbated by remote work and digital platforms .

A further source of resistance is the perception that technology serves organizational efficiency at the cost of individual creativity, autonomy, or non-quantifiable values .