Sure. There are however probably also plenty of examples where the opposite is true (people being hesitant to use newer better technologies) like not everyone wanting to use computers early on ("the old lady in accounting" etc), people not trusting new medications, people being slow in adopting tractors, people being afraid of electricity (yes!) etc. Change is hard, and people generally don't really want to change. Makes it even harder if you fear (which ~25% of people do, depending on where you are in the world) that AI can take your job (or a large part of it) in the future
I use AI and it makes me a lot more productive. I have coworkers who don’t use AI, and are still productive and valued. I also have coworkers who use AI and are useless. Using AI use as a criteria to do layoffs seems dumb, unless you have no other way to measure productivity
AI helps most for low-value tasks as well. The real valuable problems are the ones that can’t be solved easily, and AI is usually much less help with those problems (e.g., system design, kernel optimisation, making business decisions). I’ve seen many people say how AI helps them complete more low-value tasks in less time, which is great but not as meaningful as other work that AI is not that good at yet.
You have to get quite sophisticated to use AI for most higher-value tasks, and the ROI is much less clear than for just helping you write boilerplate. For example, using AI to help optimise GPU kernels by having it try lots of options autonomously is interesting to me, but not trivial to actually implement. Copilot is not gonna cut it.
If something is really clearly better, people come around. Some people never will but their children and apprentices adopt the new ways. A whole community of practice experimenting is very powerful. Everyone does not move at once, but people on this site know how often the cool new thing turns out to be a time bomb.
