Very interesting article about AI and early adopters among contract workers. It brought to mind a former client who was ahead of his times being a digital marketer when it was not even a well-defined line of work. P took to new technology like duck to water even though he was not the youngest or the most educated in his peer-group at work. The other marketers were comfortable doing things the old way even when they had seen P succeed with digital tools. They just did not see the connection between the tooling and the creative and iterative nature of their work. For most of these folks, the tools broke their natural rhythm - they were not resisting adoption because they were technophobes or luddites. They simply could not gain the acceleration P was using the set of tools he was so adeptly using.
Fast forward some twenty-five years, P is still in the same role he was in those many years ago. Everyone else he once worked with has moved on to do other things - some have changed careers a few times. If I think of that experience as something to learn or extrapolate from, I have to question the wisdom, merits and even feasibility of at-scale adoption of this technology to the point all employers can have require and expect every employee to augment their work with AI to be more prolific, productive and other things. There will be the likes of P and then there will the rest. For some the benefits will be hard if not impossible to harness and they will find some other way to adapt to the world as they find it - just like all those folks who worked alongside P did.
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