“We think we’re on the cusp of the next evolution, where AI happens not just in that chatbot and gets naturally integrated into the hundreds of millions of experiences that people use every day,” says Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, in a briefing with The Verge. “The vision that we have is: let’s rewrite the entire operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC.”
…yikes
As is frequently the case for relatively tech-savvy people, I do free tech support for my older relatives. In the past year or two it’s become so much easier because 99% of the time all I have to do is remind them “have you asked Copilot how to do that?” And they’ll go “oh yeah,” go ask Copilot, and that tells them how to fix their problem.
You are on the Fediverse, a niche platform that has inordinate appeal to people with a particular attitude and aptitude toward tech. And this particular community has its own set of attitudes that tend to get reinforced thanks to the upvote/downvote system. This is a bubble we are in here. If you look around at the people here and draw conclusions about what people in general want you’re going to get a very inaccurate view.
Chatgpt.com is the fifth-most heavily visited website as of August. AI is popular.
Yep, and so the population gets even stupider. Yay.
Sorry, not a proponent of it. But honestly I saw the writing on the wall when people got rid of cds and dvds for streaming. People are idiots, and want a corpo controlled life they can stew in, being stupid and fat,exactly like the matrix.
Can you fix your own car? If your refrigerator fails, can you fix that too? How about medical conditions, are you able to treat any and all of those? Prepare any kind of meal? Assemble a wooden cabinet from raw materials? Weld and cut metal? Sew clothing, plant a garden, paint a picture, play a musical instrument?
There’s always things that people are good at and other things that they’re not good at. We live in a civilization where we specialize in things because it’s impossible to learn everything that needs to be done. You think you’re good at troubleshooting computer problems, and that’s a fine thing to be good at. Other people are not good at it. They need help with it. That doesn’t make them “stupid.” It makes them people who’ve chosen to focus on other things.
Except for the medicine stuff, I am confident I would be able to do all of those things actually, given a bit of time for research and enough motivation. Even more critically, when I have a problem like that where I don’t care enough to figure it out for myself, I call upon the expertise of an actual human that really knows things, not a glorified autocomplete with internet access.
So aside from the things that you can’t do, you can do anything.
I bet you Google it.
Why yes, I do frequently google things. Searching for proper tutorials and official documentation for technical subjects is a more intelligent thing to do than asking an LLM to do all my thinking for me. As for the actual humans I was talking about there, I meant bringing my car in to be serviced by a mechanic as an example, if I learned the mechanic working on my car was just following instructions provided by chatGPT I would be fucking livid.
Okay? I’m not sure how any of this is detracting from the point I’m making here. You can’t do everything yourself. Nobody can do everything for themselves, society is too complicated now. So we pick the things we’re good at. Not being good at troubleshooting your PC doesn’t make you “stupid”.
I’m not arguing for that some people, this sounds like a good thing. I’m just imagining said older-relative types asking something like “check my emails” and the AI tries to open their unconfigured outlook lite or whatever and says “I’m having trouble doing that”. I’m sure if it works they’d be all over it, I just don’t believe it will.