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
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“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.
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”.
Which is why I’ve dropped it myself. Not worth the price.
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.
Gold doesn’t exist anymore. Now it’s game pass core or something…the rate went up with that forced “migration”. You do get access to a few “free” games with core, but you gotta pay way more to have the full deal. I think core (which is the cheapest, baseline option) is $70/yr now? (Edit- i just checked my statement, it’s $78.50)
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.
Small sample but everyone i know dropped it on the increase to 30 bucks. One of them had been primarily playing PlayStation and xbox for the last decade but has gotten and primarily plays steam deck now.
Textbook example of enshittification.
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’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”
And students who are using it in school aren’t learning, because ChatGPT is doing all their work - badly - for them.
This is the one that really concerns me. It feels like generations of students are just going to learn to push the slop button for any and everything they have to do. Even if these bots were everything techbros claimed they are, this would still be devastating for society.
I’ve been programming professionally for 25 years. Lately we’re all getting these messages from management that don’t give requirements but instead give us a heap of AI-generated code and say “just put this in.” We can see where this is going: management are convincing themselves that our jobs can be reduced to copy-pasting code generated by a machine, and the next step will be to eliminate programmers and just have these clueless managers. I think AI is robbing management of skills as well as developers. They can no longer express what they want (not that they were ever great at it): we now have to reverse-engineer the requirements from their crappy AI code.
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.
Yes. Then I come on Lemmy and see a dedicated pack of heralds constantly professing that they do the work of 10 devs while eating bon bons and everyone that isn’t using it is stupid. So annoying
“Cognitive amplifier?” Bullshit. It demonstrably makes people who use it stupider and more prone to believing falsehoods.
Demonstrably proven, too.
EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use.
https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/
I study mechatronics in Germany and I don’t avoid it. I have yet to meet a single person who is avoiding it. I have made tremendous progress learning with it. But that is mostly the case because my professors refuse to give solutions for the seminars. Learning is probably the only real advantage that I have seen yet. If you don’t use it for cheating or shorcuts, which is of course a huge problem. But getting answers to problems, getting to ask specific follow up questions and most of all researching and getting to the right information faster (through external links from AI) has made studying much more efficient and enjoyable for me.
I don’t like the impact on society AI is having bur personally it has really helped me so far. (discounting the looming bubble crises and the market effect it is having on memory f.e.)
Yeah, it is a tool, and it has to be used correctly. It also offers a trade off when you research some topics: You gain time, but slowly lose the ability to conduct the research yourself. If I don’t have time constraints I avoid AI, so I can maintain my skill of searching, categorizing, and piecing together information, which is a key skill in a fast moving industry (SW dev)
Also for learning I usually use it for follow-up questions, without a base understanding it can halicunate whatever and spoon feed it to my brain. Nothing can compete with an AI which designed to burp out the most sound phrases ever existed. Unfortunately correctness is not on par with it.
I often help my yunger sister, she wants to learn programing, and I noticed she uses extensive amount of AI. She can solve issues with the help of an AI but cannot solve it alone. At least its not Vibe coding, she uses it for sub-tasks. But I fear it hinders her learning.
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.
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.
“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)
They aren’t Microsoft anymore, they’re full on Microslop.
One might say they‘re Macroslop.
you will enjoy your chatbot that confidently tells lies while electricity bill goes up by 50% and the nearby datacentres try to make the next model not use em-dashes
As a long-time user of the em-dash I’m pissed off that my usual writing style now makes people think I used AI. I have to second-guess my own punctuation and paraphrase.
We suffer together! At least my semicolon is still safe.
I don’t use LLMs for anything creative for the express purpose of avoiding generic tone, haha.
Yeah. I just wouldn’t feel comfortable putting my name to a slice of that dreary blandness.
How can you lose social permission that you never had in the first place?
The peasants might light their torches
Datacenters are expensive and soft targets.
Dude, building are pretty hard.
not OP but I believe they’re “soft” in the sense that they don’t have moats/high electric fences/battalions of armed guards around 24/7
With a clipboard you could probably just walk in and start unplugging things
That’s… Not quite true. Usually they take access quite seriously. If in a multi tenant space every space will be separated and the physical cages around the machines locked and monitored.
All the same they are designed to keep small numbers of mostly law abiding people out, not an angry mob with torches.
Challenge accepted
Agree. I live in Winnipeg, Canada, and I have visited local datacentres - anything built in the last twenty years would be very hard to physically penetrate with stealth alone.
There are older ones which might be a bit less sophisticated, but that’s not the norm.
Yeah but it’s really easy to hurt their feelings so be mindful
This guy knows how to translate billionaire dipshit speak.
“Torching” the gas turbines what are on AI companies datacenters would be highly effective. Especially since they are outside and only a fence protects them.
It is so dump what they gas our environment for “AI”. It was evil doing it in WW1 and WW2 and it is still today. See:
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk-xai-datacenter-memphis
- https://capitalbnews.org/musk-xai-memphis-black-neighborhood-pollution/
It is insane.
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
The whole point of “AI” is to take humans OUT of the equation, so the rich don’t have to employ us and pay us. Why would we want to be a part of THAT?
AI data centers are also sucking up all the high quality GDDR5 ram on the market, making everything that relies on that ram ridiculously expensive. I can’t wait for this fad to be over.
- 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.
May the depression be long lasting and heartfelt in the United States of AI.
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.
Well, they at least have investor permission…which is the only people they care about anyway
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.
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.
Literally burning the planet with power demand from data centers but not even knowing what it could possibly be good for?
That’s eco-terrorism for lack of a better word.
Fuck you.
And eco-terrorism in the sense of destroying the environment, as opposed to destroying attempts at destroying like thr Unabomber.
Social permission? I dont remember that we had a vote or something on this bullshit.
Perhaps he considers society not insisting their politicians kick them out societal permission.
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
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
It is, just not for the pleb class.
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.
Our cogs do not feel amplified.
My dad is saying that he won’t hire anyone who doesn’t use AI, while he hires engineers from India for pennies.
One of my family members lost their job managing the self checkout, but he can prompt an LLM. Can your dad give him a job?
XD He probably would if he wasn’t waiting on a noncomittal (read scammy) investor to come through.
you never had it to begin with. Goddamn leeches.
