On the resistance to new technology, and why it never changes

The Church Window
It was March 2019. I was sitting alone in my study in Malmö, on the third floor, a window facing St. Peter’s Church. The light at that hour in March in southern Sweden is very particular — low, pale, almost colourless, falling across the old stones.

I had been hearing the term GPT, and I sat down to see what it was.
I typed a prompt: Write a 300-word fairytale about a woodcutter, a princess, a toad, and an enchanted bird.

It produced a beautiful fairytale. I started a new thread and gave it the exact same prompt. It produced another — completely different. Different characters, different turns, different ending. The same four elements, recombined by something that seemed to understand what a fairytale was.

This was not a search engine returning links. This was something that appeared to think.

I sat with the laptop open. The church outside was silent. No bells.

I did not feel afraid. What I felt was closer to wonder, and beneath the wonder, a kind of recognition. It seemed to me that we had figured out something about how the brain works — that the brain was not something cosmically complex, but rather a pattern, and that by replicating the architecture of that pattern at scale, we had achieved something that looked, from the outside, like thought. Whether it was thought was a question I set aside. What I could not set aside was the speed at which it would develop.

I sat very still, and did not know exactly what I was looking at. But I had felt this before. Twice before. And both times, the world had thought I was wrong.

The Seminar
I had become an evangelist, and I was met, almost immediately, with contempt.

The Macintosh was a toy, I was told. Not a real computer. Real computers ran on command lines. Real computers were serious.

I remember one seminar on multimedia. I had invited an Apple employee to demonstrate HyperCard — a piece of software that allowed anyone, not just programmers, to build interactive documents. It was a radical idea, and I believed in it completely. Halfway through the demonstration, a man in the audience stood up.

— We are here to hear about multimedia, he said. Not to receive Apple promotion.

The Apple employee left before he had finished. The anger in the room was real. I remember standing there afterwards, understanding for the first time that the resistance was not about the software. The software was only the occasion.

The Bank
A few years later I stood in an auditorium at one of the largest banks in Sweden, projecting from my computer, talking about the Internet. Afterward, the CEO, a well dressed, around fifty, with elegantly cut hair, asked whether I thought the Internet was something for their bank.

I said I would not hesitate. I would start immediately.

Our technical manager does not agree, he said.

Faint giggles in the auditorium.

I shrugged. Said nothing. Waited for the next question.

I never met the technical manager. I knew he was somewhere in that auditorium. I just did not know which face was his. I have thought about him many times since. He was not a stupid man. He was the bank’s technical manager. He knew more than I did about banking, about security, about the thousand practical reasons a large institution cannot simply lurch into something new. He had real reasons. He was also wrong.

That was the thing I was slowly learning. The people who resisted were rarely foolish. They were often the most competent people in the room. That was what made the resistance so hard to answer. It came dressed in expertise.

The Three Stages
Arthur Schopenhauer observed that all truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Then it is accepted as self-evident. In 1986 I heard Alan Kay quote this in a talk, and I wrote it down. I have never forgotten it.

Schopenhauer was writing about philosophy. But he could have been writing about any significant technology turn in human history. The pattern is so consistent, across so many centuries and cultures, that it begins to look less like a social phenomenon and more like a law of nature — something built into the way human beings relate to change itself.

The standard explanation for resistance is economic: people fear for their jobs, and they are right to. But the resistance runs deeper than income.

When writing was invented, the orators of the ancient world faced the extinction of an entire form of human authority — the authority of the living voice, the man who knew. Plato, in the Phaedrus, argued through Socrates that writing would weaken memory and produce only the illusion of knowledge. He was not entirely wrong. He was just, on balance, wrong enough.

When Gutenberg’s press began to multiply books across Europe, the Church lost something it valued more than the scribes’ livelihoods: control of the text. Anyone could now own a Bible and form their own conclusions. The Ottoman Empire banned the printing press for nearly two hundred and fifty years — not primarily to protect scribes, but to protect authority.

When the railways came, doctors warned that speeds above thirty miles per hour would cause heads to explode or drive passengers mad. The warnings were absurd, but the fear behind them was not. The railway compressed space in a way that genuinely reorganized human life. The resisters sensed this before they could articulate it.

When photography arrived, portrait painters feared the end of their profession. Some were right — the market for painted likenesses did collapse. But painting did not die. Freed from the obligation to record what things looked like, painters began to explore what things felt like. Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism — the entire revolution of modern art was, in part, made possible by the camera. The portrait painters who survived were those who understood that the new technology had not replaced them. It had liberated them, if they were willing to be liberated.

What the resisters in every age have in common is not stupidity. What they share is something more like a failure of imagination about the direction of change — combined with a very accurate imagination about what will be lost. The losses are real and immediate. The gains are abstract and future. A scribe who has spent thirty years perfecting his hand can see exactly what the printing press will do to him. He cannot see what it will do to human literacy over the following century. The asymmetry is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of time.

The Uncle
I did not have to look far. My uncle was a typesetter. About one meter eighty, leather trousers even in his fifties, hair always unkempt, black going grey, ears that stood out from his head. He set type for a living and he was good at it. He could look at a page and know, without measuring, whether the spacing was right.

When desktop publishing arrived, he lost his job. The machine did what he did, faster and cheaper, and it did not need twenty years of experience to do it.
He did not collapse. He opened a café in Malmö, then bought a discothèque and restaurant in the centre of Karlshamn. It was called Tre Hjärtan — Three Hearts — and it was successful. His son, my cousin, always had money. I rarely did, though that never bothered me much.

He was not just a man with a job. He was a typesetter. That was who he was. The machine did not just take his income. It took his category. And he built a new one.
Not everyone does. My wife’s sister-in-law was a proof-reader at Hemmets Journal. She was good at her work. Then computers arrived that could do what she did, faster and cheaper, and she was let go. I knew her. She sat at our dinner table. She is not a historical example. She is a person.

What I Know
I did not close the laptop and run to tell anyone. There was no one in the house to tell. I sat for a long time watching the light leave the church wall. I thought about the angry man at the multimedia seminar. I thought about the technical manager in the bank auditorium, whose face I never saw. I thought about my uncle in his leather trousers, standing in Tre Hjärtan, pouring drinks for strangers in a life he had not asked for and had built anyway. I thought about my wife’s sister-in-law, at our dinner table, quiet.

Three times now I have stood at the edge of something that most people around me did not yet see. Three times I have been told I was wrong, naive, or simply selling something. And each time, eventually, the thing I was describing became so obvious that nobody remembered having doubted it. Always the same three stages. Always the same surprise at the end.

What I had was pattern recognition — I had seen the shape twice already, and I recognised it on sight the third time.

The pattern is not kind. It takes people like my uncle and makes their category disappear. It takes people like my wife’s sister-in-law and leaves them at a dinner table with no work to go to. But the pattern is also not optional. The angry man at the seminar did not stop what was coming. The technical manager did not stop the Internet. The refusal is always louder than it is effective.

The question is not whether artificial intelligence will change things. It will. The question is what the portrait painters will do — whether they will spend their energy fighting the camera, or discover what the camera has, in its irresistible arrival, made newly possible.

You can spend your energy arguing with what is coming, the way the man in the auditorium argued with the Apple employee, and become the face nobody remembers. Or you can do what my uncle did — lose the thing you were, and build the next thing. Not because it is fair. It is not fair. But because the alternative is to sit at the dinner table, quiet, and wait.