Microsoft’s Nadella wants us to stop thinking of AI as ‘scum’

A few weeks after Merriam-Webster named “slop” as word of the yearMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella explained what to expect from AI in 2026.

In his classic and intellectual style, Nadella wrote about his personal blog that he wants us to stop thinking of AI as “slop” and start thinking of it as “bicycles for the mind.”

He wrote: “A new concept that evolves “bicycles for the mind” such that we still view AI as a scaffold for human potential rather than a substitute.

He continued: “We need to move beyond the arguments between neglect and sophistication and develop a new balance in terms of our ‘theory of mind’ that takes into account that humans are equipped with these new tools of cognitive amplification in our relationships with each other.

If you analyze those syllables, you might find that he’s not only urging everyone to stop dismissing AI-generated content as nonsense, but he also wants the tech industry to stop talking about AI as a useless product. replacement of humans. He hopes the industry will instead start talking about it as a human aid productivity tool.

Here’s the problem with this framing, though: much of AI agent marketing uses the idea of replace human labor as a means of setting the price and justifying its expenditure.

Meanwhile, some of the biggest names in AI have sounded the alarm that this technology will soon lead to very high levels of human unemployment. For example, in May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that A.I. could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobsincreasing unemployment to 10-20% over the next five years, and it doubled that figure last month in an interview on 60 Minutes.

Yet we currently do not know how true these apocalyptic statistics are. As Nadella implies, most of today’s AI tools don’t replace workers, they are used by them (as long as humans don’t care). check the correctness of the work of the AI).

An oft-cited research study is the ongoing one from MIT Iceberg Projectwhich seeks to measure the economic impact on employment as AI enters the job market. The Iceberg Project estimates that AI is currently capable of performing approximately 11.7% of paid human work.

Although it has been widely reported that AI would be able to replace almost 12% of jobs, the project claims that what it actually estimates is how much work can be entrusted to AI. It then calculates the salaries attached to this unloaded work. Interestingly, the tasks he cites as an example include automated paperwork for nurses and computer code written by AI.

This is not to say that no jobs are significantly impacted by AI. Corporate graphic designers and marketing bloggers are two examples, according to a substack called Blood in the machine. Then there are the high unemployment rates among junior coders new graduates.

But it’s also true that highly skilled artists, writers, and programmers produce better work with AI tools than those who don’t have the skills. AI cannot yet replace human creativity.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that as we approach 2026, some data is emerging showing that the jobs where AI has made the most progress are actually thriving. Vanguard Economic Forecast Report for 2026 found that “the roughly 100 occupations most exposed to AI automation are actually outperforming the rest of the labor market in terms of job growth and real wage increases.”

The Vanguard report concludes that those who masterfully use AI make themselves more valuable and no longer replaceable.

The irony is that Microsoft’s own actions last year helped give rise to the narrative that AI is coming for our jobs. The company was made redundant more than 15,000 people in 2025even though it posted record revenues and profits for its last financial year, closed in June – citing the success of AI as the reason. Nadella even wrote a public note on layoffs after these results.

Notably, he did not state that internal AI efficiencies led to reductions. But he said that Microsoft needed to “reimagine our mission for a new era” and named “AI transformation” as one of the company’s three business goals at that time (the other two being security and quality).

The truth about job losses attributed to AI in 2025 is more nuanced. As Vanguard’s report points out, this had less to do with the internal efficiency of AI and more to do with ordinary business practices that are less attractive to investors, such as ending investments in slowing areas to accumulate in growing ones.

To be fair, Microsoft wasn’t alone in laying off employees while pursuing AI. This technology would be responsible for nearly 55,000 layoffs in the United States in 2025, according to a study by the firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. CNBC reported. That report cited deep cuts last year at Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft and other tech companies pursuing AI.

And to be fair, those of us who spend more time than we should on social media laughing at memes and AI-generated short videos might argue that slop is a bad thing. one of the most entertaining (if not the best) uses of AIAlso.