AI criticism and pushback.

When you say "AI cannot do my job, [insert whatever reason you find compelling]" Execs only hear "I am trying to protect my job from automation".

The executives have convinced themselves that the AI productivity benefits are real, and generally refuse to listen to any argument to the contrary. Especially from their own employees.

This impedes their ability to evaluate productivity data; If a worker fails to show productivity, it can't be that AI is bad, because that'd mean the executives are wrong about something. It must be that the employee is sabotaging our AI efforts.

Front-line workers have a conflict of interest (AI making their jobs easier may lead to layoffs); they're incentivized to be productive, but not so productive that they or a peer they like ends up without a job. That conflict of interest becomes extremely strong when most companies around them are already conducting layoffs, they already know people personally who've been laid off, and hiring remains at a low level compared to the 2010s and early 2020s.

Executives don't care about any of that and just want to make the organization more efficient. They don't care at all if the net effect is reducing headcount. In fact, they want that -- smaller teams are easier to manage and cheaper to operate in nearly every way. From an executive's standpoint, they have nothing to lose: the absolute worst-case scenario is it ends up over-hyped and in the process of rolling it out they learned who's willing to attempt change and who's not. They'll then get rid of the latter people, as they won't want them on the team because of that personality trait, and if AI tooling is broadly useful they won't even bother backfilling.

Well AI advocates keep insisting that the only reason for someone to not benefit is if they're resistant to change and too lazy to learn.

I've come to appreciate that using AI tools are a skill on it's own. Anything beyond auto code completion takes quite a bit of conscious effort to experiment with and then learn how to delegate to in a workflow. They often end up being valuable, but it did take some work to get out of my productivity 'local maximum' that maybe not everyone would naturally take on.

Execs more or less always assume that workers are some combination of stupid and lazy

After all if they weren't stupid and lazy they would be important execs, not unimportant workers

I think if LLMs improved or our usages of them improved to the point we became design/code reviewers full time many of us would leave to do something less boring and so in some ways there is a negative incentive to investigate different AI driven workflows.

That adds to the dissonance for sure.