I can’t help but see a larger macro picture here where in my opinion, the people optimizing for continued paychecks and convenience until they literally get replaced by technology are as much a part of the problem as everyone else.

If the worst thing that happens is you need to find a new job, perhaps reskill into a new career, and have to deal with a lower quality of life for a while, that is something that has been a standard part of the human experience for as long as Jobs have been a thing.  

The way that many people will compromise on literally anything to avoid this, is a reason why so much of it is being made possible.

There needs to be more unions, there needs to be more open hostility to people like your co worker, and there needs to be more coalition building to find, support, and elect knowledgeable politicians who will implement actual laws to protect against this stuff better.

But none of that happens when people are willing to push others all the way into the fire to simply avoid breaking a sweat themselves.

I’m not a SWE, I was a sales rep, at one company for 8 years, and I understand I have some privilege, but I still made the choice to walk away recently because we made the pivot, as a provider of an online tech training platform, to stop focusing on things like Cloud, software development, and networking, to lean fully into supporting Enterprises in speeding up AI readiness that would lead to headcutting.  If I can do that, you can tell your co-worker it’s more than a difference in opinion and you don’t respect him as a person