A Luddite Reaction to Computers Is No Wiser Than the 19th Century Version

Progress is not defined by what we know, it’s what we no longer need to know. National Review editor Rich Lowry seemingly disagrees.

Writing recently at the New York Post, Lowry observed that “someone should take a sledgehammer to every computer and iPad in our schools…Paper books and Number 2 pencils should be the hottest commodities in K-12 education.” That’s one way of looking at schooling, but Lowry might consider it in another way.

He would no doubt agree that every single U.S. industry has undergone not one, but countless disruptions of the technological variety. Considering the film industry alone, Barry Diller noted in his excellent 2025 memoir that over the past century the five major movie studios “absorbed television, cassette recorders, compact discs, all forms of distribution; whatever disruption came their way.” The latest is the streamers, including Netflix, a business once so irrelevant that Blockbuster passed on buying it twice, and that then Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes once dismissed as “the Albanian Army” relative to the studios referenced by Diller.

Thought of in terms of computers, iPads, screentime, and AI, the guess here is Lowry would agree that teachers who’ve been teaching much the same for centuries would profit from a little disruption themselves. Businesses that do the same thing repeatedly achieve obsolescence within a matter of years, but education is somehow different? As opposed to the problem, it’s no reach to say computers and AI will do far more to fix schools (the only industry in the world where age is an attribute!) than vouchers and tuition tax credits ever could.

Lowry adds that “On the one hand, screens and social media make people dumber by diminishing our attention span, while, on the other, AI makes it easier to be stupid by doing our thinking for us.” Here too Lowry could arguably be convinced otherwise. Industry itself once again instructs.

Just about everything workers formerly did on the job they no longer need to do. But as opposed to signaling decline, forward-looking market indices have consistently bid up the future to reflect better times ahead.

In business, one of the certain absolutes is that if machines can do it for us, all the better. Most Americans knew how to farm in the 19 th century, only for tractors and fertilizer to thankfully spare future generations of knowledge that would be worthless today. Just the same, what is the division of labor among hands and machines but an acknowledgement that the path to greater wealth and exponentially better living standards is paved by a narrowing of work skills?

Considering knowledge alone, the machines of the future will think for us too. If so, this has to be great in much the same way that the pin factory Adam Smith observed in the 18 th century was brilliant. One man working alone in the pin factory in generalized fashion could maybe produce 1 pin per day, but 10 men working together in specialized fashion could produce tens of thousands.

Never explained is why book knowledge that’s been passed down over many centuries would be any different from work knowledge. Lowry might consider this, and if so, he might change his tune.

If machines that do and think for us will gift the world with jobs that fit myriad skills previously unrewarded, can education that’s seemingly never changed be at all relevant to where we’re headed? The speculation here is no, which is why Lowry and other computer/AI skeptics should embrace the very advances that they want to take a sledgehammer to.

Originally published on Real Clear Markets.