I see more and more people rejecting AI, across a spectrum of reasons. Some political, a lot are a moral or humanity-first stance, some practical.

I think often about this quote, misattributed to Gandhi, and actually most likely from a trade union activist in the early 1900s:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

The evolution of all major new technologies has followed some type of this pattern. Calculators, cars, computers - most things I can remember follow this pattern generally, seen through the eyes of the innovation.

I think AI is the same way, and I wonder what will happen with the growing divide between people who are adopting and leaning in versus those who are taking a hard stance against it.

It’s probably inevitable that AI will be widely adopted over time across all industries, and it’ll be the new software eating the world. And it follows that more and more people in the workforce will be using it, and those people will be able to outperform their non-AI peers, on average, by an order of magnitude or more.

So what happens to the holdouts? Will there be enough of them to put a chilling effect on adoption? That seems unlikely. Will this divide be like the one we saw when computers first started to show up in offices?

Back in the 80s, there were plenty of people who resisted the computer revolution. So much so, that a paper called Computerphobia estimated a quarter to a third of adults as being somewhere on the anxiety spectrum about computers. Despite that, it didn’t stop it. Computers came roaring in, and dominated the world. So much so, that it’s unfathomable to imagine work without them today.

I have to imagine the people resisting will find it harder and harder to compete in most roles. There will be exceptions, for sure, but it’s not likely that the industry slows down to accommodate the luddites.

To me, this is a default reason to lean into learning this stuff. You don’t have to love it, and you don’t have to believe it’ll change the world, but just like computers, it’s going to be the new predominant tool in most areas of work for the rest of the future, so it’s a good idea to work out how to live alongside it and work with it productively.