In 1589, a Nottinghamshire curate named William Lee knelt before Elizabeth I and demonstrated a machine of his own devising: the stocking frame, the first knitting machine, a contraption that imitated the darting fingers of a hand-knitter and did their work faster. Lee expected a patent and a fortune. He received neither. The queen, by tradition, refused him—twice—out of tender concern for the multitude of her subjects who earned their bread by the needle. A machine that knit stockings, she is said to have reasoned, would reduce honest knitters to beggary. Better the work remain in human hands.
The precise words attributed to Elizabeth are almost certainly apocryphal; one is right to be suspicious of verbatim transcripts from Tudor audience chambers. But the instinct behind them is very much alive. It animates the latest episode of Acton Line, in which I sat down with my colleague Stephen Barrows, the Acton Institute’s chief operating officer, to examine Bill Gates’s sprawling new essay on artificial intelligence, “The turbulent AI era is here.”
Gates argues that this technology is categorically unlike the disruptions that came before. Where past machines replaced muscle, AI targets cognition itself; where past tools demanded training, this one speaks our own language; what it offers, in Gates’s phrase, is “portable intelligence.” From that premise flows a striking proposal: that we designate certain “human-reserved occupations,” domains of work fenced off for people alone.
Stephen was unpersuaded that AI is so wholly new. The bulldozer displaced the ditch-digger, yes, but the spreadsheet displaced the bookkeeper and AutoCAD the draftsman: cognitive, skilled, white-collar work, gone or transformed. He pointed to the Anthropic Economic Index, which finds current AI use running somewhat more toward augmentation than outright automation: tools that make us more productive rather than simply redundant. Both of us can testify to the former from our own desks.
But the heart of our disagreement with Gates lies in that word reserved. Elizabeth reserved knitting for human hands by royal fiat, and the frame simply left. Lee carried his machines to France, where Henri IV welcomed what England had spurned. Barrows’s objection is the classical liberal’s: what is genuinely valued need not be commanded. If people prefer a human hand at the bedside of the dying, or the honest imperfections of handcrafted goods, the market will register that preference far more faithfully than any government reserve. The principle at work is subsidiarity, that decisions belong at the level closest to the human person, not decreed from above. It should govern our anxieties about children and screens, too: not the surveillance model perfected in China, but simple tools that put parents, rather than the state, in charge of their own households.
For all this, neither of us treated the essay as merely wrongheaded. The gravest danger of these technologies, Stephen suggested, is not to our paychecks but to our persons: to friendship, to family formation, to the fragile business of falling in love and raising children, already strained by falling fertility across the developed world. A tool that answers every need may quietly erode our need for one another.
The essay’s most surprising note was one we welcomed. Gates, hardly a man given to piety, calls for religious thinkers to be brought into the conversation, invoking Pope Leo XIV’s concern that technology remain at the service of the human person. To that I would add what Gates underplays: the capacity of firms themselves for moral self-government. Anthropic’s own refusal of certain military applications suggests that conscience need not always wait upon regulation.
Which returns me to William Lee. Elizabeth’s fear was not baseless; some knitters surely suffered. But the frame she barred did not vanish. It went abroad, came home, and two centuries later helped kindle an age of abundance she could not have imagined, one that lifted the descendants of those very knitters out of the poverty she had sought to spare them. She saw the seen and could not see the unseen.
We cannot un-invent the machine. The question this Acton Line conversation left me with is not whether to hold it back, but whether we will meet it with the moral resources—freely chosen virtue, the family, the church—that no royal reserve and no federal statute can supply. A curate built the first frame. Four centuries on, a technologist asks the clergy back into the room. That is a hopeful sign.