Reports from the United States and Switzerland point to a growing backlash against artificial intelligence. Could this escalate into violent resistance, echoing the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution? This is the question a recent article in the NZZ am Sonntag explores, drawing on the research of economic historian Joachim Voth, whose work sheds light on the roots of this backlash and the conditions under which technological change can trigger collective unrest.

This piece by Maura Wyler draws on the article «Die grosse Wut auf Kollege KI» by Alain Zucker, published in the NZZ am Sonntag on May 24, 2026.

AI proponents are facing growing hostility at American universities. A Molotov cocktail was thrown at the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in San Francisco. And in Switzerland, an activist group called «Aufstände der Allmende» is planning a week-long resistance camp near the Rhine Falls under the slogan «Short-Circuit AI.» According to the NZZ am Sonntag report, nearly 30 percent of knowledge workers across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe are actively sabotaging their employer’s AI strategy – a figure that rises to 44 percent among Generation Z.

These fears, acts of resistance, and outbursts of anger toward AI echo the machine-breaking movements of the Industrial Revolution. What drives them and how serious is the risk of violent unrest closer to home?

A threshing machine that changed everything

To understand what is happening today, it helps to travel in the mind’s eye to the English county of Kent – and back to the year 1830. On August 28, a crowd of 400 agricultural laborers destroyed their landlord’s threshing machine. It marked the beginning of a wave of more than 3,000 incidents of unrest that swept across England over two years: the famous Captain Swing riots. Yet these were not simply acts of machine-breaking – they were also protests against depressed wages, the Poor Law, local power structures, and the broader impoverishment of rural laborers.

But what actually drove the violence? That is precisely the question Joachim Voth and Bruno Caprettini set out to answer empirically, using newly collected data on the diffusion of threshing machines combined with rigorous econometric methods. Their findings strongly suggest that labor-saving technology played a central role in generating unrest. Parishes with early adoption of threshing machines had a significantly higher probability of experiencing riots.

Conditions for unrest

Yet not every parish with a threshing machine experienced violent unrest. Voth and Caprettini’s research shows that where alternative employment opportunities softened the blow of new technology, there was less rioting. Conversely, where prior enclosures had already impoverished the laboring poor, the effect of threshing machines on unrest was amplified.

Voth applies this same historical framework to the current AI backlash – and in doing so, he pushes back against the more apocalyptic forecasts cited elsewhere in the NZZ am Sonntag report. As he told the paper: “Large-scale job losses have to occur, and those affected need to share strong common interests at the same time and in the same place in order to organize into an effective collective force. But what does an office worker at Swiss Re have in common with a highly skilled programmer who can retrain as a prompt engineer?”

The critical difference from 1830

The fragmentation of those potentially affected is the crucial distinction from the situation in 1830. The Captain Swing riots were a deeply rural phenomenon: agricultural laborers in neighboring parishes, sharing the same skill sets, the same employers, the same grievances. Those who stand to lose their jobs to AI today belong to a far more heterogeneous group – from graphic designers to lawyers to journalists.

“Large-scale job losses have not occurred – and perhaps they never will,” Voth told the NZZ am Sonntag. The historical evidence points to a decisive factor: technological change does not automatically produce collective unrest. What matters is whether large groups are simultaneously, visibly, and similarly affected. In the case of AI, that condition does not currently appear to be met.

Under what circumstances might the adoption of labor-saving technology lead to extreme social instability? UBS Center Policy Brief 2/2018 examines the case of the Captain Swing riots in the industrializing England of the 1830s, bringing new insights to this old episode by collecting original data on the diffusion of the threshing machine, an innovation that led to severe labor unrest in wheat-growing parts of the country. The evidence illustrates that while new technologies typically boost output overall, not everyone benefits – and the losers may not always suffer in silence. Societies need to find ways to cushion the blow of technological unemployment, perhaps by offering alternative work or providing minimum income guarantees.