Workers should learn AI skills and companies should use it because it’s a “cognitive amplifier,” claims Satya Nadella.
in other words please help us, use our AI
“Cognitive amplifier?” Bullshit. It demonstrably makes people who use it stupider and more prone to believing falsehoods.
I’m watching people in my industry (software development) who’ve bought into this crap forget how to code in real-time while they’re producing the shittiest garbage I’ve laid eyes on as a developer. And students who are using it in school aren’t learning, because ChatGPT is doing all their work - badly - for them. The smart ones are avoiding it like the blight on humanity that it is.
As evidence: How the fuck is a company as big as Microsoft letting their CEO keep making such embarassing public statements? How the fuck has he not been forced into more public speaking training by the board?
This is like the 4th “gaffe” of his since the start of the year!
You don’t usually need “social permission” to do something good. Mentioning that is at best, publicly stating that you think you know what’s best for society (and they don’t). I think the more direct interpretation is that you’re openly admitting you’re doing the type of thing that you should have asked permission for, but didn’t.
This is past the point of open desperation.
_
I’m watching people in my industry (software development) who’ve bought into this crap forget how to code in real-time while they’re producing the shittiest garbage I’ve laid eyes on as a developer.
I just spent two days fixing multiple bugs introduced by some AI made changes, the person who submitted them, a senior developer, had no idea what the code was doing, he just prompted some words into Claude and submitted it without checking if it even worked, then it was “reviewed” and blindly approved by another coworker who, in his words, “if the AI made it, then it should be alright”
“if the AI made it, then it should be alright”
Show him the errors of his ways. People learn best by experience.
And they are all getting dependent and addicted to something that is currently almost “free” but the monetization of it all will soon come in force. Good luck having the money to keep paying for it or the capacity to handle all the advertisement it will soon start to push out. I guess the main strategy is manipulate people into getting experience with it with these 2 or 3 years basically being equivalent to a free trial and ensuring people will demand access to the tools from their employees which will pay from their pockets. When barely anyone is able to get their employers to pay for things like IDEs… Oh well.
We watched this exact same tactic happen with Xbox gamepass over the last 5 years. They introduced it and left in the capability to purchase the “upgrade” for $1/year. Now they are suddenly cranking it up to $30/month and people are still paying it because they feel like it’s a service they “have to have”.
This recent massive price hike (it fucking doubled) is what got me to cancel my live, completely.
I’ve been subscribed since 2002, when it first released. So their greed lost a sure stream of income. I’m not alone.
Is it $30/month on top of Xbox gold or does the game pass include it?
It’s included, but good lord if that’s not a very high price for temporary access to a collection of bargain bin games. You could buy a full price game every other month for that money.
or 3-6 indies on sale - hell if you save up that money you can go nuts every steam/gog same, 360$ should get you around 1k$ games retail price upwards if you are a patient gamer
Edit: and you can KEEP that, not temporary
On top of that, I have personally developed some gaming habits that I don’t care for at all as a direct result of gamepass.
Subscriptions are thieves of intentionality
What type of habits?
The theoretically vast availability has made me quick to abandon games that didn’t deserve it. I’m having a lot of difficulty committing to even some objectively good games. I don’t enjoy the bouncing around and yet I keep doing it. It feels related to FOMO.
Renting is always going to end up the same way.
I get that users think they get much value for low money, but it’s always bait and switch.
Sure (statistically) nobody cares, though.
Hell, Microsoft and Apple did the same thing decades ago. Microsoft offered computer discounts to high schools and colleges, so that the students would be used to (and demand) Microsoft when they went into the business world. Apple then undercut that by offering very discounted products to elementary and junior high schools, so that the students would want Apple products in higher education and the business world.
The tactic let them write off all the discounts on their taxes, but lock in customers and raise prices on business (and eventually consumer) goods.
I decided not to finish my college program partially because of AI like chatgpt. My last 2 semesters would have been during the pandemic with an 8 month work term before. Covid ended up canceling the work term and would give me the credit anyway. The rest of the classes would all be online and mostly multiple choice quizs. There wasn’t a lot of AI scanning tech for academic submissions yet either. I felt if i continued, I’d be getting a worse product for the same price (online vs in class/lab), wont get that valuble work experience, and id be at a disadvantage if i didnt use AI in my work.
Luckily my program had a 2 year of 3 year option. The first 2 years of the 3 year is the same so i just took the 2 year cert and got out.
Was AI really that big of a thing at the time of Covid?
It was just starting out around that time, hence why it wasn’t much of a concern in my earlier semesters. Plus they had better in class controls for cheating like monitoring computers and in person exams instead of online. You would have got an instant fail if you got caught using AI or plagarism on your projects.
So…he has something USELESS and he wants everybody to FIND a use for it before HE goes broke?
I’ll get right on it.
Nice paraphrasing!
It‘s insane how he says „we“ not as in „we at Microsoft“ but as in „Me, I and myself as the sole representative of the world economy say: Find use cases for my utterly destructive slop machine… or else!“
Tech CEOs have all gone mad by protagonist syndrome.
Well, he is the “money man”. He doesn’t DO any of the work himself, he “buys” workers.
He has NO skill, NO knowledge, NO training, NO license. Just money. All you need is money.
How can you lose social permission that you never had in the first place?
There’s a latency between asking for forgiveness and being demanded to stop.
It’s easier to beg for social forgiveness than it is to ask for social permission
“Social permission” is one term for it.
Most people don’t realize this is happening until it hits their electric bills. Microslop isn’t permitted to steal from us. They’re just literal thieves and it takes time for the law to catch up.
[Microsoft are] just literal thieves.
Always have been.
(But now it’s worse because it’s the entire public, not just their competitors)
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining <- They’re here
- Depression
- Acceptance
The five stages of corporate grief:
- lies
- venture capital
- marketing
- circular monetization
- private equity sale
Where do the three envelopes fit in
Roll 2d6 on private equity sale. 7 or higher and you get to ride again with an IPO at position 6. 1-6 and you get to fill out the envelopes.
In my pocket
Denial: “AI will be huge and change everything!”
Anger: “noooo stop calling it slop its gonna be great!”
Bargaining: “please use AI, we spent do much money on it!”
Depression: companies losing money and dying (hopefully)
Acceptance: everyone gives up on it (hopefully)
Acceptance: It will be reduced to what it does well and priced high enough so it doesn’t compete with equivalent human output. Tons of useless hardware will flood the market, china will buy it back and make cheap video cards from the used memory.
Which seems like good progress. I feel like they were in denial not three weeks ago.
Correct, but needs clarification:
Depression referring to the whole economy as the bubble burst.
Acceptance is when the government accepts to bail them out because they’re too big and the gov is too dependent on them to let them die.
“Microsoft thinks it has social permission to burn the planet for profit” is all I’m hearing.
Probably in the Hobbes sense that they’re not actively revolting
“social permission”?
Society didn’t even permit you and others to spread AI onto everyone to begin with.
techbros don’t understand consent
As opposed to legal permission, which, hahahahaha
In English: “they’re talking about guillotines a lot”
Social permission? I dont remember that we had a vote or something on this bullshit.
Social permission = shareholder permission
He’s saying “we need an ROI on all the cash we are burning before they sell up and the board kick me out for being a delusional and incompetent buffoon”
Get in the sea Nadella
Perhaps he considers society not insisting their politicians kick them out societal permission.
The oligarch class is again showing why we need to upset their cart.
As far as I can tell there hasn’t been any tangible reward in terms of pay increase, promotion or external recruitment from using the cognitive amplifier.
If only it were a paycheck amplifier
Isn’t there some way to hack LLMs to convince every manager currently using them to increase pay in order to “streamline” or some other corpo mumbo?
The useful AI is in scientific research and accounts for a fraction of a percentage of electricity used in “AI”. It’s not sexy. It’s not hip. And it’s not going to replace any workers, so the tech bros don’t care.
My dad is saying that he won’t hire anyone who doesn’t use AI, while he hires engineers from India for pennies.
Translation: Microslop’s executives are finally starting to realize that they fucked up.
Let’s just say AI truly is a world-changing thing.
Has there ever been another world-changing thing where the sellers of that thing had to beg people to use it?
The applications of radio were immediately obvious, everybody wanted access to radios. Smart phones and iPods were just so obviously good that people bought them as soon as they could afford them. Nobody built hundreds of km of railroads then begged people to use them. It was hard to build the railways fast enough to keep up with demand.
Sure, there have been technologies where the benefit wasn’t immediately obvious. Lasers, for example, were a cool thing that you could do with physics for a while. But, nobody was out there banging on doors, begging people to find a use for lasers. They just sat around while people fiddled with them, until eventually a use was found for them.
Just make copilot it’s own program that is uninstallable, remove it from everywhere else in the OS, and let it be. People who want it will use it, people who don’t want it won’t. Nobody would be pissed at Microsoft over AI if that is what they had done from the start.
Right, except that unlike Explorer or IE after that, it siphons everything it can to send it back to Redmond so even if one does not use it, it is STILL a problem.
you never had it to begin with. Goddamn leeches.
Take away:
- MS is well aware AI is useless.
- Nadella admits they invested G$ in something without having the slightest clue what its use-cas would be (“something something rEpLaCe HuMaNs”)
- Nadella is blissfully unaware of the “social” image MS already has in the eye of the public. You don’t have our social permission to still live as a company!
I have a nagging feeling the general public does not hate Microsoft as much as computer nerds do and so probably overall their image is muddled to not that bad overall.
I believe Windows 11 and “AI everywhere” are quickly changing that. Gamers started migrating, but I believe the stats showing a growing usage of Linux on desktop as well as resistance to the Win11 migration go beyond the gamers.
But I admit: a survey right now may not yet show it. It’s probably trending up slowly.
Then you think wrong. The average consumer doesn’t care about the things computer nerds care about. Even privacy (a human right) gets arguments like “I have nothing to hide”
Otherwise they would have mass adopted the fediverse a long time ago.
The average consumer doesn’t care because they already made the purchase. Most of them use whatever OS their machine comes preloaded with unless a more tech inclined friend offers alternatives.
The OEMs do the caring, because the OEMs are the ones with the choice. And they notice this shit. So when the average consumer is buying a new machine, they might be offered alternatives to Windows (already happening with some btw), and most customers will see an extra $200 (or whatever how much nowadays) next to the Windows license, and a flat $0 next to the other option: Linux.
Now the filter is reversed, and only the ones who aren’t paying attention (assuming Windows is the default during check out) or actively want Windows will be paying for it
The savvier ones may even wonder what the difference is, and do some research to understand it, and those ones will buy it knowing exactly what they’re getting into. Some will say “I’ll just pick the free OS and install Windows for free”, but even if they decide that, they may decide to boot it up first out of curiosity.
And that’s what really matters: the exposure. Because people talk.
