There were never such wide scale and, above all, centralized efforts to coerce and shame people into using the Internet or smart phones in spite of their best efforts.
"I'm not shaming! Not embracing AI is comparable to people who didn't embrace smart phones or the Internet though".
This is a regurgitation of a marketing slogan frequented by OpenAI and similar organizations for the past four years. "AI is the future. If you don't embrace it you will be left behind".
It's intellectually insulting to be subject to as it relies primarily on fear to convince.
Second, your participation in the thread began as fulmination, with “I am so very tired of people who...”, and then continues in this belligerent style right through to your reply to me...
> This is a regurgitation of a marketing slogan frequented
> It's intellectually insulting to be subject to as it relies primarily on fear to convince
This style of argumentation is beneath what we're hoping for on HN, as it paints a simplistic conspiracy theory or narrow commercial incentive as the only plausible explanation for a trend. Things are never that simple, and arguments like that shut off curiosity, when the primary purpose of HN is to cultivate more curiosity.
That said - I can keep my fulminations to myself and phrase my posts in a less confrontational manner. Those aren't exactly conducive to productive discussion.
I mean, it's still ongoing! Tons of people prefer to do things the analog way, and it's certainly not for a lack of companies trying, as the analog way is usually much more expensive.
In their personal lives, everybody should of course be free to do what they want, but I also doubt that zero people have been fired for e.g. refusing to train to use a computer and email because they preferred the aesthetics of typewriters or handwritten memos and physical intra-office mail.
What they can do, however, is they can run heavy advertising campaign targeted at executives. And once executives are convinced, they will write AI policies, and some will force their workers to use AI.
And this has been happening all the time, the examples are too numerous.
Executives decided the shops will now use computerized registers. The cashiers had to adopt, or get fired.
Executives decided - no more typewriters. All documents must be written in Microsoft Word, stored in Sharepoint. The workers have to learn Microsoft Word and Sharepoint or get fired.
Executives decided that that engineers (not computer ones, mechanical ones) should use CAD instead of drafting machines. The amount of engineers who were "let go" because they were protractor head wizards but could not figure out the mouse was truly large.
For something closer to CS, there was version control, automated tests, git, github... In a lot of cases, people where not "willingly choosing it" - if the rest of your team started using SourceSafe, you can't keep using your favorite shared folder anymore, not if you want others to see your results.
"willingly choosing it" only works for personal projects, it is never guaranteed for hired workers.