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
Well you already lost that or rather never actually had that. You all pushed a broken and incomplete product you need to find a use not us…
AI is the only “product” that I’ve ever seen where the sales pitch is, “We made it and now you should want it, but you have to figure out why you want it.”
Even if I do want it, there are plenty of free models that I can use locally, on my desktop PC. They don’t phone home, either, so Nadella doesn’t see a cent from me directly or indirectly.
It’s like Facebook’s squandering tens of billions of dollars on the Metaverse even though nobody asked for it or wants it. Ultimately they had to give up on it, and the same thing will happen here.
Isn’t there plenty of research it’s the opposite of a cognitive amplifier, people get cognitively lazy using ai.
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.
I know something useful that can be done with AI in its current form. Toss it in the fucking garbage maybe.
On the one hand, I get it. I really do. It takes an absurd amount of resources for what it does.
On the other hand, I wonder if people said the same of early generation comptuers. UNIVAC used tubes of mercury for RAM and consumed 125KW of electricity to process a whopping 2k operations per second.
Probably not. Most people weren’t aware of it, nor did they have a care for power consumption, water consumption, etc. We were in peak-American Exceptionalism in the post-war era.
But, had they, and computers kinda just…died. Right there, in the 1950s. Would we have gone to the moon? Would we have HDTV? iPhones? Social Media? A treacherous imbecile in charge of the most powerful military the world has ever seen?
Probably not.
So…I do worry about the consumption, and the ecological and environmental impact. But, what if that is a necessary evil for the continued evolution of technology, and with it, society? And, if it is, do we want that?
And, to go a step further, could AI potentially aid in finding realistic ways to undo the harms that it had caused? Or those of anthropogenic climate change?
(https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/birth-of-the-computer/4/83)early generation computers fueled a demand that was being supplied by rooms and rooms of human calculators calculating and checking each other’s works for scientists, engineers, businesses, and government agencies
(Manhattan Project, Atomic Heritage Foundation picture)they would not have died out, because they were a necessary part of the evolution of technology at their time. more importantly, they were more accurate than their human calculators. computers don’t forget to carry a number to the next digit or flip them around. barring exceptionally rare cosmic radiation events. and their technological progression fueled an ever greater need until now when tech has entered post-scarcity when it comes to calculating power.
generative AI in contrast was an offering looking for a purpose. spare gigaflops no longer needed for tech people are trying to sell by building more and more hype for calculating power. sucks to be the one who invests into it, but that’s business. sometimes investment don’t work out. if microsoft can’t hype up a demand then it is unnecessary technology.
That first picture is great. That’s essentially generative AI, right? You cast out a problem and have it solved multiple times asynchronously, then find the (mean/median/mode) value.
I do wonder how many of those ladies (weird how “computer” was a largely female profession, and then IT quickly became a largely male profession. Not making any commentary here, just kind of a showerthought observation) got laid off because of the computer. I wonder what they did after their jobs were replaced by it, and if that in turn was a net positive for them/their families.
I guess this was right around the peak of the babyboom, so I think I know what they did. And for a while there, it was feasible for a typical family to do well on a single income.
That’d be nice. Maybe next time around we can get it so that families can do well on a single part-time income. Or more gender-equality for who stays home and who works. Hell, I think a lot of families would be happy to be able to do well on two full-time incomes now. But this is getting into the devaluation of human labor now, instead of the evolution of technology.
Many of the female “computers” became programmers. IT being a male profession is a later development, partly fueled by home computers being marketed as toys for boys. It’s also mostly a western phenomenon. In former soviet states MINT professions are much closer to a 50:50 split between women and men.
Those old computers you speak of: They worked. There is no comparison to be made here.
They were built in order to give us an edge on the battlefield. More accurate artillery and the like. They did math which humans could do, but which would take humans weeks or months, and the answers were required within timeframes more like 12 hours, because war.
They were so useful, so valuable, that they were worth the treasure spent. They conferred a kind of superintelligence to their users. Those with brains to understand could see this, and so yes, hobbyists found their way to building their own machines, once small CPUs became available, however janky. Anyone who had to do math, who had to do math, went into debt if they had to, and learned to use these janky beasts because the advantage was weeks or months of time they didn’t have to grind on paper.
There is nothing about AI that resembles any of that.
LLMs are dead end tech which is only useful for people who want to do unethical shit. They’re good at lying, making up nonsense, sounding like humans, facilitating scams, and misleading people. No matter how much time and energy is spent developing them, that’s all they’ll ever be good at. They can get better at doing those things, but they’ll never be good at anything actually useful because of the fact that there is no internal logic going on in them. When it tells you the moon is made of various kinds of rock, the exact same thing is happening as when it tells you the moon is made of cheese and bread. It has no way of distinguishing between these two statements. All of its ‘ideas’ are vapor, an illusion, smoke and mirrors. It doesn’t “understand” anything it’s saying, all it does is generate text that looks like something someone who does understand language would say. There is no logic in the background and there cannot be.
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.
Paper books are the way.
No
LOL
We need an American Zelenskyy who would save us from the oligarchs.
Like a president but good?
How can you lose social permission that you never had in the first place?
It’s easier to beg for social forgiveness than it is to ask for social permission
The peasants might light their torches
This guy knows how to translate billionaire dipshit speak.
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
“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.
So they pushed to male AI, but never had a good use case for it that was world changing, so now they want help to monetize it.
Feels like most trending tech these days. I’m so tired.
Yeah, cause its totally not end-stage capitalism to invest a trillion dollars into something and THEN figure out what its for.
Microsoft CEO warns that we must ‘do something useful’ with AI or they’ll lose ‘social permission’ to burn electricity on it
<Insert AI generated video of Microsoft CEO dancing around with willies on his head>
I appreciate the social permission for so many folks to switch to Linux. KDE has come a long way.
How about we train them on killing billionaires?
just need to get rid of jensen, and it will all collapse.
A single point of failure you say? 🤔
Can we not all just log into chat gpt at the same time and ask it to count from zero up to a googleplex sequentially in one second intervals?
