The most urgent true story in modern tech begins two hundred years ago. Textile workers in the North of England set on a course towards obsolescence by new machines, struck back, when workers known under a banner of a mythical apprentice named “Ned Ludd” as the Luddites rose up and staged nightly factory raids, using machine hammers to smash machines and forcing the British government to place the entire region under military occupation rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using unauthorised machine to erase their livelihoods. The Luddites who organised guerilla raids to smash those machines-on punishment of death and won the support of Lord Byron, the notorious lothario whose populist defenses of the working class helped bring about his celebrity; Robert Blincoe, the orphan whose brutal experiences in a cotton factory from the age of seven likely inspired Charles Dicken’s character Oliver Twist, enraged the Prince Regent (the future King George IV), whose decadent revelries provided a foil to the weaver’s escalating privation, and inspired the birth of science fiction. The all-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees. Luddite movement has spawned mythologies of its own, drawing in writers attracted to its doomed romantic broadsides against modernity, as militant workers’ movement erupting at the dawn of industrial capitalism.

Today, technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are crowding factory floors, and artificial intelligence will soon pervade every aspect of our economy. How will this change the way we live? And what can we do about it? Merchant who authored the study of the iPhone The One Device, produces an entertaining analysis and intertwines a lucid examination of our current age with the story of Luddites, misunderstood machine breakers of the industrial revolution show how automation change our world and is shaping our future. While describing the background and motivation for their protests, he draws parallels with Uber drivers, ad warehouse Amazon workers and struggle in the face of technology fueled change.

Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant, Little Brown £21.79.