Anti-AI Luddites are on the rise in California
Artificial intelligence may be all the rage these days, but you would never know it, given the flurry of anti-AI legislation proposed in Sacramento. The fate of the industry may rely on a fight between two competing California values: the embrace of technological innovation and the government’s insatiable desire to regulate everything to death.
There have been dozens of AI-related bills proposed in California in just the past couple of years. This anti-AI fervor may be puzzling in a state that is home to Silicon Valley and where technology is one of the strongest sectors of the economy. But the California Legislature is also beholden to labor unions, and many of the proposed bills are backed by unions fearful of AI-related job losses (and, therefore, losses in union dues).
Gov. Gavin Newsom seems to be trying to walk a narrow line to not destroy an industry critical to the state’s economy while still placating union interests bent on limiting it. State and national labor leaders are already putting Newsom on notice that protecting jobs from AI will be a major factor in earning their support for his likely 2028 presidential run.
California became the first state in the nation to adopt a regulatory framework for the most advanced AI systems when Gov. Newsom signed Senate Bill 53 into law in September 2025. The legislation is targeted at the largest AI companies with the most advanced “frontier model” technologies. It requires them to establish and publicly post standardized safety frameworks, creates an incident reporting system and provides whistleblower protections for workers in the industry. In addition, the bill established the CalCompute consortium charged with developing a framework for the creation of a public cloud computing cluster.
State agencies also adopted some AI regulations last year. The California Civil Rights Department extended existing California Fair Employment and Housing Act protections against discrimination to employees and job applicants evaluated by an employer’s “automated decision system.” And beginning Jan. 1, 2027, California Privacy Protection Agency regulations will place limits and transparency requirements on companies utilizing automated decision-making technologies in hiring, promotion/demotion, compensation and termination decisions, as well as those profiling consumers or employees, such as the evaluation of work performance.
And even as the state moves toward allowing expanded testing of driverless vehicles, including heavy-duty trucks, some local governments are trying to squelch the technology. Last month, following Waymo’s November 2025 announcement that it plans to bring its autonomous taxi service to San Diego, the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System Board of Directors voted 12-1 to oppose the expansion of such technologies without local regulation, and urged the state to allow local governments to impose such restrictions.
“Waymo’s driverless cars are not fair competition,” wailed Mikhail Hussein, president of the United Taxi Workers of San Diego.
“No corporation should be allowed to quietly replace people with machines just to boost profits, especially without local communities having any say,” added San Diego Councilmember and MTS board member Sean Elo-Rivera, who proposed the resolution.
This is a ridiculous statement on its face. Technology is constantly evolving and being incorporated to provide new, better and cheaper goods and services, which is why the vast majority of the population no longer must rely on subsistence farming, as we did in the early days of our nation. Old jobs are continuously rendered obsolete and new jobs are created. Businesses are not established to be merely jobs programs and entrepreneurs should not have to ask the government’s permission to incorporate new technologies to improve their businesses.
This reminds me of a story about Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. While he was overseas touring a canal project in the 1960s, Friedman was surprised to note that the workers only had shovels and there were no tractors or earth-moving equipment. A government bureaucrat with him explained, “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Friedman famously replied, “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
Free-market capitalism and technological progress have allowed even the poorer members of society to obtain goods once considered luxuries and substantially improved the standard of living. This may come as cold comfort to someone whose job is eliminated by AI, but to give into the modern-day Luddites and stifle technology in order to prevent short-term pain to some, at the expense of denying the benefits of technology to the population at large, would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Adam Summers is a columnist, economist, and public policy analyst, and a former editorial writer for the Orange County Register / Southern California News Group. He is also editor and coauthor of “Beyond Homeless: Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes, Transformative Solutions.”