I just listened to a Search Engine episode about Waymo and driverless cars (The Trial of the Driverless Car), and it made me so angry. Not at Waymo, though. There has always been tension between people who do a job and the companies trying to mechanize or automate the job, but all of these people have been arguing about the wrong thing… And they’ve been doing it for 200 years.

The podcast centers around the story of Waymo attempting to begin operating in Boston (our fair city!) and meeting resistance from all the people whose jobs are threatened by cars without human drivers. The Teamsters, rideshare drivers, livery drivers, and so on.

Some of the standout moments of the episode are clips of hearings in which Boston City Councilor Julia Mejia of Dorchester is heard grilling Waymo, fiercely defending the jobs of her constituents, and being generally very sassy (a reputation she evidently cultivates).

All of that showmanship is entertaining, at least in the way that watching highly paid executives writhe and contort themselves to not answer direct questions is entertaining. But what I felt as a listener in that moment was utter frustration. This entire show, this “trial” as the podcast title frames it, is interrogating the wrong defendant.

I’m genuinely ambivalent about self-driving cars, but it isn’t Waymo that’s on trial here. The machine has never been the villain, and the real antagonist has been right here in front of us for essentially all of American history.

We’ve always sought to replace expensive, error-prone humans with cheaper, more reliable machines. From the plow to the loom to the assembly line to the algorithm, we’ve supplanted manual labor with automation the moment it becomes viable. The machines, in each of those cases, were just tools; at best they made life easier and sometimes longer, and at worst they held up a mirror to our poor decisions.

The most well-known people to have gazed into that mirror, and recoiled at what they saw, were the “Luddites” of Nottingham, UK, in 1811. Many people think of the Luddites as anti-technology, but that is a misconception. The Luddites were skilled craftspeople who used machines every day. What they rose up against was not the machines, but the decision of mill owners to capture all the gains of automation while the workers absorbed all of the losses.

What gets left out of the story is that they didn’t just start smashing looms. They organized, they appealed to Parliament, they went through legitimate legal channels. They saw, as anyone could, that the impending automation would displace their jobs and, having no other skills, they’d be screwed.

Parliament, at that time deep in Napoleonic War debt and riding a growing wave of laissez-faire mentality, told them in more diplomatic terms to fuck straight off. That’s when the Luddites started smashing the looms. When they understood that their fates had been sealed, that nobody was going to come save them from the automation revolution that would force them into poverty.

Much is made of “protecting jobs.” We’ve painted ourselves into a corner, politically, where it’s very safe to talk about “creating jobs” or “saving jobs,” but spectacularly risky to talk about “protecting people.” We’ve spent centuries innovating ourselves into extraordinary abundance, and yet we still treat your job as the cost of survival, even if the existence of the job and your ability to do it are entirely out of your control.

The hearings in Boston mirror the Luddite revolution, but in a different order. Julia Mejia chewing out the Waymo exec is the modern equivalent of smashing the looms, blaming the technology for the destitution that will be faced by the people that the technology displaces. At least the Luddites knew who the real enemy was.

These Boston drivers shouldn’t be yelling at Waymo, they should be yelling at their government that has provided no displacement protections, the healthcare system that chains dignity to employment, and the very American cultural consensus that treats “get a job” as the answer to all social problems. Mejia yelling at Waymo for a problem that she and her colleagues show up to work every day to perpetuate is the real scandal.

For 200 years, we have had every opportunity to figure out how to let machines do more work without making humans disposable, but instead, we’ve done nothing. The only improvement over Nottingham in 1811 is that Parliament deployed an actual army against the Luddites, while in modern America we just let displaced workers starve and die in relative anonymity.