The Guardian view on AI and jobs: the tech revolution should be for the many not the few | Editorial

<p>Britain risks devolving its digital destiny to Silicon Valley. As a TUC manifesto argues, those affected must have a greater say in shaping the workplace of the future</p><p>In <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/06/100-best-non-fiction-books-no-19-making-of-the-english-working-class-ep-thompson-1963-robert-mccrum">The Making of the English Working Class</a>, the leftwing historian EP Thompson made a point of challenging the condescension of history towards luddism, the original anti-tech movement. The early 19th-century croppers and weavers who rebelled against new technologies should not be written off as “blindly resisting machinery”, wrote Thompson in his classic <a href="https://uncomradelybehaviour.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/thompson-ep-the-making-of-the-english-working-class.pdf">history</a>. They were opposing a laissez-faire logic that dismissed its disastrous impact on their lives.</p><p>A distinction worth bearing in mind as Britain <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-tech-prosperity-deal-is-huge-but-will-the-uk-reap-the-benefits-265621">rolls out</a> the red carpet for US big tech, thereby outsourcing a modern industrial revolution still in its infancy. Photographers, coders and writers, for example, would sympathise with the powerlessness felt by working people who saw customary protections swept away in a search for enhanced productivity and profit. Unlicensed use of their creative labour to train generative AI has <a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/how-ai-profits-can-help-fund-cultural-production-by-mariana-mazzucato-and-fausto-gernone-2025-07">delivered</a> vast revenues to Silicon Valley while rendering their livelihoods increasingly precarious.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/28/the-guardian-view-on-ai-and-jobs-the-tech-revolution-sho