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.
Love your name.
Wild guess here is the social one is the one where most countries has allowed them to do what it takes and special contract deals.
Likely not public socially. At least, I doubt that.
Last time they were crying that nobody wanted it and made the word bad. It’s all kinda strategy to converse most amount of people you can. Like other users mentioned above the post of people in their org using gpt. I see this too in my org and by variety or engineers or regular folks and I face palm every time because you get responses that roughly makes sense but contextually are horrendously poor and misunderstood entirely.
Desperation probably because they invested so much money on something of a demand that doesn’t even exit yet.
deleted by creator
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.
I’m usually too lazy when it comes to canceling things, but I canceled Game Pass right away. $30 per month is just offensive.
Agreed
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.
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.
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”
“if the AI made it, then it should be alright”
Show him the errors of his ways. People learn best by experience.
You’re right, they SHOULD be fired.
Management loves that they are using AI, they will probably get promoted if anything.
It’s being pushed very hard by management where I work and I’m consistently seeing the same as above. I mentioned on another thread recently that I’ve heard “I don’t know why Claude did that” multiple times over the past few weeks.
It’s infuriating.
The number of times I’ve been debugging something and a coworker messages “I asked ChatGPT and it said [obviously wrong thing]” makes me want to gouge my eyes out
A scapegoat to shove that little responsibility (golden parachute) they get paid for so much on.
Look for another work place as soon as you can. If not you will forever be in the position of being the cleaner of their shit and you will not gain anything by it. They will get their metrics going up and you will be known to be the slow guy because you care about fixing the code.
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.
Well, one way or another it won’t be too many generations. Either we figure out it’s a bad idea or sooner or later things will go off the wheels enough that we won’t maintain the infrastructure to support everyone using this type of “AI”. Being kind of right 90% of the time is not good enough at a power plant.
Businesses have invested too much time, money and promises in AI to admit they made a mistake, now. And like all business models based on the Sunk Cost Fallacy, it’s going to do a lot of damage along the way before it finally dies.
Even one or two seems like it’d be catastrophic. And if nothing’s changed until they enter the workforce and start fucking shit up, I’d say that’s something like 10 years of teens becoming dependent on it and losing out on critical education and development (presuming worst case - no market crash). That’s a lot of damage.
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.
but instead give us a heap of AI-generated code and say “just put this in.”
we now have to reverse-engineer the requirements from their crappy AI code.
It may be time for some malicious compliance.
Don’t reverse engineer anything. Do as your told and “just put this in” and deploy it. Everything will break and management will explode, but now you’ve demonstrated that they can’t just replace you with AI.
Now explain what you’ve been doing (reverse engineering to figure out their requirements), but that you’re not going to do that anymore. They need to either give you proper requirements so that you can write properly working code, or they give you AI slop and you’re just going to “put it in” without a second thought.
You’ll need your whole team on board for this to work, but what are they going to do, fire the whole team and replace them with AI? You’ll have already demonstrated that that’s not an option.
So in your case, not only is the LLM coding assistant not making you faster, it’s actively impeding your productivity and the productivity of your stakeholders. That sucks, and I’m sorry you’re having to put up with it.
I’m lucky that in my day job, we’re not (yet) forced to use LLMs, and the “AI coding platform” our upper management is trying to bring on as an option is turning out to be an embarrassing boondoggle that can’t even pass cybersecurity review. My hope is that the VP who signed off on it ends up shit-canned because it’s such a piece of garbage.
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
God, that’s so frustrating. I want to shake them and shout, “No, your code is 100% ass now, but you don’t know it because it passes tests that were written by the same LLM that wrote your code! And you have barely laid eyes on it, so you’re forgetting what good code even looks like!”
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.
Wym you would be at a disadvantage? College isn’t a competition. By not using AI in the learning process and submissions you might get a lower grade than others, but trust me no one fucking checks your college grades. They check if you know what you are doing.
In fact you wouldn’t get a lower grade, others would have an inflated grade which then won’t translate to skills and will have issues in the workforce.
It didn’t sit right with me. I made the deans list each semester before that for good grades. I wanted no speculation that my grades were influenced by AI in the next semester. In a competitive job market, making the deans list consistently could absolutely stand out among other candidates. It shows respect for deadlines and the education.
This has to be a bot - no student in the history of the universe has ever said this, ever
Not a bot. Both my internship interviews commented on me making the deans list.
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.
“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.)
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.
“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.
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?
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.
Not to mention the water depletion and electricity costs that the people who live near AI data centers have to deal with, because tech companies can’t be expected to be responsible for their own usage.
I mean, do you really think it’s better idea to let them build their own water and power system separate?
They should be forced to upgrade the existing infrastructure so everyone benefits.
They should be forced to upgrade existing infrastructure and pay for it. They are refusing to pay for it, and the electric companies are passing the costs onto the residents near these data centers, which is grossly unfair.
They should be forced to build closed loop systems and green energy sources.
I’d love to take humans out of the equation of all work possible. The problem is how the fascist rulers will treat the now unemployed population.
Yep. Ideal future is robots do all the work for us while we enjoy life.
But realistic future is rich people enjoy life while normal people starve.
Don’t forget the few “lucky” people doing the most disagreeable of jobs because they’re still hard to automate and the starving population provides a cheap desperate pool of labour to do even the most dangerous and unhealthy jobs for a pittance.
The rich seem to be common evil denominator. It is time to act against them. Worldwide.
I mean, this is literally an argument against using oxen to plough fields instead of doing it by hand.
The answer is always that society should reorient around not needing constant labour and wealth being redistributed.
- 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.
techbros don’t understand consent
As opposed to legal permission, which, hahahahaha
In English: “they’re talking about guillotines a lot”
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It’s not 100% of it, but it’s a large portion.
Excel isn’t replaced because your company already bought it. There are many alternatives to Excel and most of them are acceptable to the overwhelming majority of people who use Excel (people using it for tables and basic graphs) and none of them have displaced Excel.
I mean look at Word. It absolutely sucks and yet it’s standard anyway. Same with Outlook.
Hence why I mentioned Excel or it’s alternatives. I was responding to you referring to spreadsheet software as a simple table/matrix.
I wasn’t saying that’s all it is. I was and am saying that that’s why and how a large portion of people use it.
There is a lot of usefulness in simple data structures with a GUI over top. That’s why the data structures were invented in the first place. People–especially in software product management–are insistent that the complicated features are what keep people using software, even when it’s obviously untrue.
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.
Just to give you two examples of stuff I used today:
Excel has PowerQuery, which is a really fancy and nice way of importing data into your spreadsheet. You can import data from another spreadsheet, from an CSV, a database or from websites and update them with one click. You can also transform that data during import. So if you want to just use two columns of that spreadsheet from accounting, you can import them in the format you need. And if accounting updates their spreadsheet, you can update yours with one click. LibreOffice doesn’t have this as far as I know with that power.
The other one is simply plugins for nearly every other business system in the world. I have this nice BI plugin which gives me a pivot table of our sales data. So if I want to know how my revenue was yesterday, I can update my spreadsheet with one click. I can also jack into our CRM and get f.e. visit data from our sales reps.
So in this case I can take some data that is sitting somewhere on the company drive, import & transform it and then mash it up with sales data from BI and CRM. So building a quick report like “which accounts were created last year and have no sales and have no visit from sales reps” is quite easy. And if I want I can also set this up to create this with PowerQuery & Co so that I can do this report monthly/weekly without having to copy & paste data every time. That’s not really possible with LibreOffice right now.
There will be comments that this is not a job for Excel and that you should use Python/SQL queries/whatever for that task, but Excel is what most companies have. I could do it with Python, but it is not installed on my business computer and people are used to Excel and are not trained in Python. There is a reason why businesses are using Excel for everything and that is because it is easy, quick and gets shit done
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 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.
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
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?
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.
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.
