‘Let’s learn from that history’: opera looks to luddites for how to deal with AI

New work by Ben Crick and Kamal Kaan suggests we could benefit from knowing more about the ‘machine-wreckers’

If you ask artificial intelligence when in history we can learn lessons about the global challenges of AI it does, thankfully, agree with the composer Ben Crick: 200 years ago in the north of England.

Crick believes we could all benefit from knowing more about the luddites, the “Industrial Revolution machine-wreckers”, and we need to draw lessons from them to address what is, for some, the biggest existential question of our time.