4 ms·

> If you're just tuning in, the company announced that it's moving to make Windows an agentic operating system, which is when AI does most of the decision-makin

by tdeck 11mo ago

> If you're just tuning in, the company announced that it's moving to make Windows an agentic operating system, which is when AI does most of the decision-making and heavy lifting. They will do anything but let users make decisions about their own computers that they own. If having agency is so great, why does every Windows version take more of it away from me?

altairprime 11mo ago
Because you’re not a source of recurring revenue and therefore have no useful value to their annual growth target for revenue growth per year. If they ship an AI operating system they can lay off a ton of costly interface engineers in favor of a Cortana search box and the cost offset of your freely-donated training data to their bottom line. If AI succeeds, any corporation that has adopted it will drastically outpace those who have not in growth of revenue growth per year by already having dumped the deadweight ballast of human workers. Windows 11 is positioned to deliver on that promise, if only they can stick the landing, and they don’t understand why we all hate on AI because their largest paying customers are desperate for them to provide it, to unlock the exponential growth factor from the shackles of Still All Humans. They assume most people don’t realize how much profit there is to be had from AI if they succeed, and so of course they think we’re confused — and in large part they’re right to think that. People do not understand AI is necessary to prevent the U.S. GDP bubble from popping — not the AI bubble, that’s just a sideshow. If AI succeeds, growth of wealth per capita continues (while us all working-class folks stay poor, but that’s not anything Microsoft would know or care about); if AI fails, much of the corporate economy shatters into dust, including Microsoft. Don’t we all want Windows to continue existing, etc. This all isn’t certain to come to pass, but it’s a well-understood and significant threat in certain groups. No one will say it to anyone outside those groups — and so Microsoft is confused that we don’t like it, without explaining the existential threat to the future of Microsoft if it fails.
- aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
  > People do not understand AI is necessary to prevent the U.S. GDP bubble from popping — not the AI bubble, that’s just a sideshow. If AI succeeds, growth of wealth per capita continues (while us all working-class folks stay poor, but that’s not anything Microsoft would know or care about); if AI fails, much of the corporate economy shatters into dust, including Microsoft. Don’t we all want Windows to continue existing, etc. It is investment 101 not to put all eggs in one basket. I immediately get it that some years ago an investment into AI (in the sense of NLMs) was a decent idea because in the (rare) event that people actually get NLMs to work decently, it would pay off big. But if you apply some common sense, already from beginning on it was clear that the hurdles to overpass so that AI becomes more than just some experimental toy were huge. So, what Microsoft did was like investing, say, 1 billion USD into one single lottery ticket which with a probability of, say, 0.1 % gives you 50 trillion USD and with 99.9 % probability it gives you 0 USD, i.e. the investment opportunity has a huge expected value, but in all likelihood, it will burn money. In a solid portfolio, you add some of these highly experimental investments to your portfolio, but you base your company on much more solid investments. The same statement hold for betting a big part of the future of the national economy on such a strange lottery ticket. I cannot find any other explanation for this behaviour than stupidity.
  - yetihehe 11mo ago
    > I cannot find any other explanation for this behaviour than stupidity. I can find one other explanation: greed.
    - aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
      > I can find one other explanation: greed. If the decision makers were greedy, they wouldn't gamble away the future of the company (or even national economy) because with some very, very low probability the investment will make them insanely rich. Greedy people rather - want to get even much richer with a high probability, and - hate it when an investment that they do is with an insanely high probability a dog. In other words, as I already outlined: such greedy investors would for sure invest some small amount of their investment volume into some insanely high-risk-high-reward opportunities such as AI, so that in the rare event that if this turns out to be huge, they will nevertheless profit insanely from it, but they would never bet most of their money on this single investment area.
      - binary132 11mo ago
        You seem to be mistaking greedy decision makers for highly reasonable decision makers, and assuming they are not convinced that this particular hype wave is their last best hope for big line going up forever.
        aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
        > this particular hype wave is their last best hope for big line going up forever. No hype wave has ever gone up forever in history, so I think it is legitimate to call such a crazy kind of model assumption for the investment "stupidity".
        binary132 11mo ago
        You know what I meant. And perhaps you’d like to refer to what some of these people seem to think about AI — things like the idea that it’s going to so radically take over and disrupt society that there won’t be any work left for humans. That roughly approximates Big Line Up Forever for whoever’s building and running the machines. It IS stupid. But it’s very real in both Silicon Valley and corporate America boomer capitalism.

by tdeck 11mo ago

altairprime 11mo ago

Because you’re not a source of recurring revenue and therefore have no useful value to their annual growth target for revenue growth per year. If they ship an AI operating system they can lay off a ton of costly interface engineers in favor of a Cortana search box and the cost offset of your freely-donated training data to their bottom line. If AI succeeds, any corporation that has adopted it will drastically outpace those who have not in growth of revenue growth per year by already having dumped the deadweight ballast of human workers. Windows 11 is positioned to deliver on that promise, if only they can stick the landing, and they don’t understand why we all hate on AI because their largest paying customers are desperate for them to provide it, to unlock the exponential growth factor from the shackles of Still All Humans. They assume most people don’t realize how much profit there is to be had from AI if they succeed, and so of course they think we’re confused — and in large part they’re right to think that. People do not understand AI is necessary to prevent the U.S. GDP bubble from popping — not the AI bubble, that’s just a sideshow. If AI succeeds, growth of wealth per capita continues (while us all working-class folks stay poor, but that’s not anything Microsoft would know or care about); if AI fails, much of the corporate economy shatters into dust, including Microsoft. Don’t we all want Windows to continue existing, etc. This all isn’t certain to come to pass, but it’s a well-understood and significant threat in certain groups. No one will say it to anyone outside those groups — and so Microsoft is confused that we don’t like it, without explaining the existential threat to the future of Microsoft if it fails.

aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
> People do not understand AI is necessary to prevent the U.S. GDP bubble from popping — not the AI bubble, that’s just a sideshow. If AI succeeds, growth of wealth per capita continues (while us all working-class folks stay poor, but that’s not anything Microsoft would know or care about); if AI fails, much of the corporate economy shatters into dust, including Microsoft. Don’t we all want Windows to continue existing, etc. It is investment 101 not to put all eggs in one basket. I immediately get it that some years ago an investment into AI (in the sense of NLMs) was a decent idea because in the (rare) event that people actually get NLMs to work decently, it would pay off big. But if you apply some common sense, already from beginning on it was clear that the hurdles to overpass so that AI becomes more than just some experimental toy were huge. So, what Microsoft did was like investing, say, 1 billion USD into one single lottery ticket which with a probability of, say, 0.1 % gives you 50 trillion USD and with 99.9 % probability it gives you 0 USD, i.e. the investment opportunity has a huge expected value, but in all likelihood, it will burn money. In a solid portfolio, you add some of these highly experimental investments to your portfolio, but you base your company on much more solid investments. The same statement hold for betting a big part of the future of the national economy on such a strange lottery ticket. I cannot find any other explanation for this behaviour than stupidity.
- yetihehe 11mo ago
  > I cannot find any other explanation for this behaviour than stupidity. I can find one other explanation: greed.
  - aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
    > I can find one other explanation: greed. If the decision makers were greedy, they wouldn't gamble away the future of the company (or even national economy) because with some very, very low probability the investment will make them insanely rich. Greedy people rather - want to get even much richer with a high probability, and - hate it when an investment that they do is with an insanely high probability a dog. In other words, as I already outlined: such greedy investors would for sure invest some small amount of their investment volume into some insanely high-risk-high-reward opportunities such as AI, so that in the rare event that if this turns out to be huge, they will nevertheless profit insanely from it, but they would never bet most of their money on this single investment area.
    - binary132 11mo ago
      You seem to be mistaking greedy decision makers for highly reasonable decision makers, and assuming they are not convinced that this particular hype wave is their last best hope for big line going up forever.
      - aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
        > this particular hype wave is their last best hope for big line going up forever. No hype wave has ever gone up forever in history, so I think it is legitimate to call such a crazy kind of model assumption for the investment "stupidity".
        binary132 11mo ago
        You know what I meant. And perhaps you’d like to refer to what some of these people seem to think about AI — things like the idea that it’s going to so radically take over and disrupt society that there won’t be any work left for humans. That roughly approximates Big Line Up Forever for whoever’s building and running the machines. It IS stupid. But it’s very real in both Silicon Valley and corporate America boomer capitalism.