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
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.
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.
“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 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.
The oligarch class is again showing why we need to upset their cart.
Social permission? I dont remember that we had a vote or something on this bullshit.
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.
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.
you never had it to begin with. Goddamn leeches.
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.
“bend the productivity curve” is such a beautiful way to say that they are running out of ideas on how to sell that damn thing.
It basically went from :
- it’s going to change EVERYTHING! Humanity as we know it is a thing of the past!
… to “bend the productivity curve”. It’s not how it “radically increase productivity” no it’s a lot more subtle than that, to the point that it can actually bend that curve down. What a shit show.
AI industry needs to encourage job seekers to pick up AI skills (undefined), in the same way people master Excel to make themselves more employable.
Has anyone in the last 15 years willingly learned excel? It seems like one of those things you have to learn on the job as your boomer managers insist on using it.
I did and it’s awesome. People like to shit on Excel, but there is a reason why every business on earth runs on Excel. It’s a great tool and if you really learn it, you can do great things with it.
It’s just a generic table / matrix thing mostly. Turns out tables are a good way to lay out a bunch of different information.
Somehow nobody has made a similar generic application to allow you to work with nested list, outline, or tree style structures, which I think are equally if not more useful structures to lay out certain types of information.
Tables isn’t what make Excel or it’s alternatives excel at tasks. If that’s all it were, it’d be easily replaced. The formulas and all the other features that help you format, arrange and represent that data is what really makes it good.
I remember in college we would use it to run Monte Carlo simulations, which I thought was cool.
Hi, occasional spreadsheet user here who cannot tell the difference between Excel and, say, LibreOffice Calc (which is what I use, disclosed). Why is Excel specifically better? No troll.
Funny thing about “AI skills” that I’ve noticed so far is that they are actually just skills in the thing you’re trying to get AI to help with. If you’re good at that, you can often (though not always) get an effective result. Mostly because you can talk about it at a deeper level and catch mistakes the AI makes.
If you have no idea about the thing, it might look competent to you, but you just won’t be catching the mistakes.
In that context, I would call them thought amplifiers and pretty effective at the whole “talking about something can help debug the problem, even if the other person doesn’t contribute anything of value because you have to look at the problem differently to explain it and that different perspective might make the solution more visible”, while also being able to contribute some valueable pieces.
Holy crap, I think you’ve cracked it.
LLM AI is the trillion collar costing, terawatt consuming rubber ducky for the new millennium!
You forgot water stealing and methane spewing
Excel depends on the usage. Way too many people want to use it for what it’s bad at, but technically can do, instead of using it for what it’s good at.
I’m fairly decent at using Excel, and have automated some database dependent tasks for my coworkers through it, which saves us a lot of time doing menial tasks no one actually wants to do.
I willingly learned excel in the past 15 years!
I have since moved on to open source replacements.
I love excel, personally. I’m a big ol’ nerd and love putting shit in a spreadsheet.
how else are you going to perform, document, and communicate engineering calculations in a format that is simple, intuitive, flexible, and easy to iterate upon?
How about we get “Universal Basic Income”, to respect all the unpaid work?
That’d make my choice of not using Excel (at the expense of risking not getting work) more worthwhile.
… And surviving genocide when welfare was stripped away, fraudulently re-labelling as “fit to work”, killing over 130,000 disabled people in Britain from 2010 to 2019, a more worthwhile struggle too.
Otherwise, it seems even if AI does not take jobs, most work done with AI will be unpaid.
Yeah, very good analogy actually…
I remember back in the day people putting stuff like ‘Microsoft Word’ under ‘skills’. Instead of thinking ‘oh good, they will be able to use Word competently’, the impression was ‘my god, they think Word is a skill worth bragging about, I’m inclined to believe they have no useful skills’.
‘Excel skills’ on a resume is just so vague, people put it down when they just figured out they can click and put things into a table, some people will be able to quickly roll some complicated formula, which is at least more of a skill (I’d rather program a normal way than try to wrangle some of the abominations I’ve seen in excel sheets).
Using an LLM is not a skill with a significant acquisition cost. To the extent that it does or does not work, it doesn’t really need learning. If anything people who overthink the ‘skill’ of writing a prompt just end up with stupid superstitions that don’t work, and when they first find out that it doesn’t work, they just grow new prompt superstitions to add to it to ‘fix’ the problem.
Skill in Excel is wholly different than skills in other Office products. But if Excel is on your resume, your better expand and show what real use you’ve made of it. Otherwise it comes off just as you said.
I’d rather program a normal way than try to wrangle some of the abominations I’ve seen in excel sheets
That’s the way I also think about learning fancy spreadsheet stuff. Spreadsheets are good for putting data into a graph. They’re good for basic numeric stuff where there’s a simple pattern that repeats. But, pretty soon you’re in a situation where you should either have a real database or a real program. If you’re doing a lot of manipulation of data, you should have a program with loops, conditionals, errors, exceptions, etc. and most importantly with comments. If you’re storing a lot of data, you should be using a real database, not hundreds of lines in a spreadsheet.
If, at the end, you do want something visual, and don’t feel like dealing with a graphics library, you can always export the data to a CSV and import that into a spreadsheet.
Microsoft Word’ under ‘skills’.
Way back in the day a bunch of people endorsed me on linkedin for a bunch of nonsense like that and I manually hid all of it lol
I’ve willingly learned Calc (LibreOffice’s open-source spreadsheet tool) because I’ve made spreadsheets for my own needs. But to “become employable”? No way.
I do. Got a free license from my last job and Excel blows the doors off Calc, or anything else. For business, Excel is moat of the reason they’re so tied into Office.
I did take a few courses on excel over the last 25 years. I don’t use excel that much but most features will never be used by most people.
Delusional, created a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist to usurp the power away from citizens and concentrate it in the minority.
This is the opposite of the information revolution. This is the information capture. It will be sold back to the people it was taken from while being distorted by special interests.
AI isn’t at all reliable.
Worse, it has a uniform distribution of failures in the domain of seriousness of consequences - i.e. it’s just as likely to make small mistakes with miniscule consequences as major mistakes with deadly consequences - which is worse than even the most junior of professionals.
(This is why, for example, an LLM can advise a person with suicidal ideas to kill themselves)
Then on top of this, it will simply not learn: if it makes a major deadly mistake today and you try to correct it, it’s just as likely to make a major deadly mistake tomorrow as it would be if you didn’t try to correct it. Even if you have access to actually adjust the model itself, correcting one kind of mistake just moves the problem around and is akin to trying to stop the tide on a beach with a sand wall - the only way to succeed is to have a sand wall for the whole beach, by which point it’s in practice not a beach anymore.
You can compensate for this by having human oversight on the AI, but at that point you’re just back to having to pay humans for the work being done, so now instead of having to the cost of a human to do the work, you have the cost of the AI to do the work + the cost of the human to check the work of the AI and the human has to check the entirety of the work just to make sure since problems can pop-up anywere, take and form and, worse, unlike a human the AI work is not consistent so errors are unpredictable, plus the AI will never improve and it will never include the kinds of improvements that humans doing the same work will over time discover in order to make later work or other elements of the work be easier to do (i.e. how increase experience means you learn to do little things to make your work and even the work of others easier).
This seriously limits the use of AI to things were the consequences of failure can never be very bad (and if you also include businesses, “not very bad” includes things like “not significantly damage client relations” which is much broader than merely “not be life threathening”, which is why, for example, Lawyers using AI to produce legal documents are getting into trouble as the AI quotes made up precedents), so mostly entertainment and situations were the AI alerts humans for a potential situation found within a massive dataset and if the AI fails to spot it, it’s alright and if the AI incorrectly spots something that isn’t there the subsequent human validation can dismiss it as a false positive (so for example, face recognition in video streams for the purpose of general surveillance, were humans watching those video streams are just or more likely to miss it and an AI alert just results in a human checking it, or scientific research were one tries to find unknown relations in massive datasets)
So AI is a nice new technological tool in a big toolbox, not a technological and business revolution justifying the stock market valuations around it, investment money sunk into it or the huge amount of resources (such as electricity) used by it.
Specifically for Microsoft, there doesn’t really seem to be any area were MS’ core business value for customers gains from adding AI, in which case this “AI everywhere” strategy in Microsoft is an incredibly shit business choice that just burns money and damages brand value.
