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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You already don’t have social permission to do what you are doing, and that hasn’t stopped you. The world is bigger than the 10 people around your board’s table.
Yea but what he means is that nobody is cutting power lines or driving trucks through walls yet.
Yet! But should.
“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”
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 $30/month on top of Xbox gold or does the game pass include it?
It’s included, but good lord if that’s not a very high price for temporary access to a collection of bargain bin games. You could buy a full price game every other month for that money.
or 3-6 indies on sale - hell if you save up that money you can go nuts every steam/gog same, 360$ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hope all parties responsible for this garbage, including Microsoft will pay a huge price in the end. Fuck all these morons.
Stop shilling for these corporate assholes or you will own nothing and will be forced to be happy.
Did they ever have social permission in the first place?
So you admit it. You admit AI isn’t useful.
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.
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.
Challenge accepted
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
Isn’t there plenty of research it’s the opposite of a cognitive amplifier, people get cognitively lazy using ai.
Geez, CEO’s don’t need any more excuses to be lazier. They gonna farm out their pointing and ordering people to carry out underlings’ ideas, and throwing tantrums, to AI?
On the flipside, I think the incentives for creativity/hard work have been eroded to the point that the outcomes don’t reflect the effort regardless of level.
Somebody above you is just going to steal your idea and get promoted for it, while you get fired so you you don’t blow their cover.
That’s not how technology is supposed to work.
“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
I work in AI and the only obvious profit is the ability to fire workers. Which they need to rehire after some months, but lowering wages. It is indeed a powerful tool, but tools are not driving profits. They are a cost. Unless you run a disinformation botnet, scamming websites, or porn. It is too unpredictable to really automatize software creation ( fuzzy is the term, we somehow mitigate with stochastic approach ). Probably movie industry is also cutting costs, but not sure.
AI is the way capital is trying to acquire skills cutting off the skilled.
Have to say though that having an interfacd that understands natural language opens so many possibilities. Which could really democratize access to tech, but they are so niche that they would never really drive profit.
AI is the way capital is trying to acquire skills cutting off the skilled.
They are banking on that. They have been talking about replacing humanity for decades. But what rhat means is a few select humans (I.E. them) will survive and be tended to hand and foot by AI who will also invent things for them.
They want that. We aren’t there yet… and probably never will. But that is what they want.
When the rest of us can’t afford to eat and face famine because the rich have gotten so fat off of hoarding everything, people will have no other choice but to eat the rich
The entire world order was built on crushing dissent and monitoring anyone inching to do anything. They probably let people vent by not censoring stuff online but they are probably documentating every we say. My question is not why, but how the hell can it be organized? I am honestly afraid to show up anywhere because I feel like the moment I do I will be blackbagged and disappeared.
The oligarch class is again showing why we need to upset their cart.
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.
No, it will be attached to every application, as well as the start menu, settings, notepad, paint, regedit, calculator and every other piece of windows you AI hating swine
we attached it to the clock in case you need it to get the time wrong.
Can we get AI on various libraries too and let it respond to API calls, I’m tired of these DLL responses being so predictable
Fucking lol.
Glad I wasn’t drinking coffee when I read this… woulda ruined my keyboard :-)
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.
