At the start of the Industrial Revolution, Ned Ludd led an impassioned but ultimately futile protest against the use of mechanized looms. The looms had begun to destroy the livelihoods of skilled textile workers. The Luddites, as Ned’s followers came to be known, feared this new technology that threatened their incomes and devalued their skills. But technological progress could not be stopped and has gone on unabated ever since, shifting more and more jobs away from physical and skilled labor and into the sphere of information processing.