𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆’𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘄. Thousands of cooler-sized bots are delivering burritos and sushi across 20 American cities. And people are tipping them over, shaking them down for pad thai, and trying to throw them off bridges. In Chicago, 3,300 residents signed a petition to ban them. Notre Dame’s student paper called for a boycott. In San Francisco, crowds set a Waymo robotaxi on fire during Lunar New Year. One guy was charged with repeatedly attacking Waymo cars, stomping windshields while passengers sat inside. This is not new behavior. We’ve seen this exact pattern for 200 years. In 1811, English textile workers called the Luddites started smashing factory machines. We use their name as an insult now, meaning “anti-technology.” That’s wrong. They were skilled craftsmen who watched factory owners use new machines to slash their wages and bypass labor standards. They didn’t hate the looms. They hated that nobody offered them a path forward. The British government sent 12,000 troops. Made machine-breaking punishable by death. Executed 17 men. Then rewrote the story so “Luddite” meant “stupid person afraid of progress.” When ATMs rolled out in the 1970s, bank tellers at Barclays snuck outside and smeared honey on the keypads. Here’s what I think many analyzing AI and robotics adoption is underweighting. The bottleneck to widespread rollout won’t just be chips and power. Those are engineering problems. Engineering problems get solved. The real friction is political. And political friction compounds. Once these technologies start producing visible job losses (not theoretical ones, real ones with real faces and real voters), the pattern from history will repeat. Workers organize. Politicians respond. Regulations appear dressed up as public safety. Entire industries get slowed for years or decades. Study history and one thing becomes clear. Technology rollouts that displace workers are never clean. They’re messy, uneven, and politically volatile. Early adopters will build cost advantages their competitors can’t see yet. Profits spike. Copycats rush in. Then the backlash arrives. From employees. From unions. From voters who elect people promising protection. The technology wins eventually. It always does. But the timeline between “this works” and “this is everywhere” is way longer and uglier than any adoption curve on a consultant’s slide deck. The people smearing honey on ATM keypads in 1975 and tipping over delivery robots in 2026 are telling you the same thing. Adoption is a human problem, not a technology problem. If you’re building with AI and automation right now, good. You’re early. But don’t confuse being early with the world being ready.