>Think about the Industrial Age transition from individual craftspeople working on small shops using hand tools to make things into working in factories on large-scale assembly lines.

I wouldn't analogize the adoption of AI tools to a transition from individual craftspeople to an assembly line, which is a top-down total reorganization of the company (akin to the transition of a factory from steam power to electricity, as a sibling commenter noted [0]). As it currently exists, AI adoption is a bottom-up decision at the individual level, not a total corporate reorganization. Continuing your analogy, it's more akin to letting craftspeople bring whatever tools they want to work, whether those be hand tools or power tools. If the power tools are any good, most will naturally opt for them because they make the job easier.

>The nature of the work and your enjoyment of it is a fundamental part of the compensation package of a job.

That's certainly a part of it, but I also think workers enjoy and strive to be productive. Why else would they naturally adopt things like compilers, IDEs, and frameworks? Many workers enjoyed the respective intellectual puzzles of hand-optimizing assembly, or memorizing esoteric key combinations in their tricked-out text editors, or implementing everything from scratch, yet nonetheless jumped at the opportunity to adopt modern tooling because it increased how much they could accomplish.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46976955

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munificent 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> As it currently exists, AI adoption is a bottom-up decision at the individual level, not a total corporate reorganization.

I'm sorry, but did you forget what page this comment thread is attached to? It's literally about corporate communication from CEOs reorganizing their companies around AI and mandating that employees use it.

> That's certainly a part of it, but I also think workers enjoy and strive to be productive.

Agreed! Feeling productive and getting stuff done is also one of the joys of work and part of the compensation package. You're right that to the degree that AI lets you get more done, it can make the job more rewarding.

For some people, that's a clear net win. They feel good about being more productive, and they maybe never particularly enjoyed the programming part anyway and are happy to delegate that to AI.

For other people, it's not a net win. The job is being replaced with a different job that they enjoy less. Maybe they're getting more done, but they've having so little fun doing it that it's a worse job.

	▲	MontyCarloHall 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>I'm sorry, but did you forget what page this comment thread is attached to? It's literally about corporate communication from CEOs reorganizing their companies around AI and mandating that employees use it. That’s exactly my point. The fact that management is trying to top-down force adoption of something that operates at the individual level and whose adoption is thus inherently a bottom-up decision says it all. Individual workers naturally pick up tools that make them more productive and don’t need to be forced to use them from the top-down. We never saw CEOs issue memos “reorganizing” the company around IDEs or software frameworks and mandate that the employees use them, because employees naturally saw their productivity gains and adopted them organically. It seems the same is not true for AI.