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Microsoft is trying to transform Windows into an agentic OS. Apparently, this means Injecting copilot into the operating system to the point where you can just ask it how to do something and it tells you exactly how to do it. Just follow its instructions, no need to know anything yourself.
I guess the argument is that it will make Windows easier to use for non-technical people. Of course, there is a multitude of problems with this:
The culture war angle:
The left absolutely hates AI. It is built by multi-billionaires looking to replace our jobs so they don't have to pay us and can take all the planet's resources for themselves. Every time AI is added to consumer products, the consumer is increasingly placed in the control of its owner. AI is known to be biased, and we have already seen the tech giants attempt to inject their own bias into them. So not only are we seeing a development in the wrong direction, we are becoming increasingly vulnerable to lies and manipulation by the most powerful in society. This is without even going into the monumental costs of training the models, and the opportunity cost from not spending the resources on other areas that would be more directly helpful to humans.
The AI doomers are afraid of AI takeover. This seems like a step towards that. A chief argument against the AI doomer scenarios has been something like "who would be dumb enough to place AI in control of key systems?" Well, Windows, apparently. While it is true that in their add, it is still the user making the final decision as to which settings to choose, it seems to me that a super-intelligent AI would be capable of manipulating most users into choosing exactly the settings best suited for the AI to manipulate them further. Besides, if this becomes a commercial success, then more is sure to follow. At least, you would expect Google and Apple to follow up, making all the mainstream OS's infected with the kind of intelligence that could ultimately destroy us.
The AI skeptics believe that AI is not going to improve much in the near future. As such, this is a misstep of moronic proportions. You even see it in the add: The user asks the AI to increase his font size. It suggests he changes the scale setting, which is currently at 150%. When asked what percentage he should change it to, the AI responds with 150%, as this is the recommended setting. The result? Nothing changes, because the setting is kept at default. Wait no, the user went against the AI's wishes and picked 200%, seemingly hoping that you would not spot this stupid mishap. If the actual marketing material is damaged by AI hallucination, how bad is the final product going to be? Are you going to have to argue with your AI until it finally does what you want? This is probably going to push more power users over to Linux, as the agent does not give them the fine control over their systems that they want. Meanwhile, it might actually make the experience worse for Grandma, who is gaslit into picking suboptimal settings for herself by an unhelpful machine.
Finally, if you are concerned about AI and mental health, you have probably heard of AI-induced psychosis. The usage of chatbots by a small minority of vulnerable people has apparently fed into their delusions, resulting in psychosis-related behavior. An agentic OS that at best requires the user to opt out of AI functionality, places the chatbot right in the user's face. While a therapist today could instruct her patients to avoid seeking out the chatbots, that is hardly possible when the main way to use your operating system is through an LLM. If copilot is on by default, or if other ways to use the system is slowly deprecated making it harder to use without the bot, I would expect this change to result in more cases of diagnosable mental health conditions.
My reply won’t be culture war focused BUT it is truly insane how poorly Microsoft has handled windows.
Consider that Apple has undergone a major architecture change and is a year out from fully phasing out Intel processors. This came with HUGE performance enhancements that make everything feel much snappier, not to mention battery life on mobile. One of the major notes on M1 was that it is ready the moment your MacBook lid opens. I’m sure a ton of work went into rearchitecting and rethinking core components to get there.
It’s shocking how performant and smooth macOS is. The beach ball is rarely, if ever, seen. They’ve had 2 major redesigns, which never feel half baked. They had enough sway over their developer community to get most of them to make Rosetta versions of apps that run better on ARM. But even fully emulated software runs better than it did on intel.
Meanwhile Windows 11 is like lipstick on a pig. They keep painting over the cruft that’s built up since windows vista, but have never actually rethought how the system works. They literally can’t because so many customers rely on old components they maintain compatibility for. Control panel is still kicking around, window scaling is still broken, etc etc etc. They have no pull over their developer community at all, so they can’t make hard choices that better the OS. Sure, they’re doing cool stuff like WSL and the terminal app. But everything is fundamentally just reskinned aero from 2007 and there’s no sense of vision.
It’s also janky as hell. Windows flash and resize when you click edit mode in Excel, a Microsoft first party app. If you have a filetype you want to open in a program that’s not in the default list, you get sent to file explorer to find the right exe file in program files (still have to see if it’s in x86). Every application install has a wizard and uninstalling an app probably needs a wizard too. No wonder Satya Nadella hates windows.
That’s why these ai features feel so dumb. They’re stuck maintaining support for old enterprise apps and everything is frozen in time as a result. I loath using my windows 11 ai enabled laptop with solid specs. It dies in like 2 hours and can never keep up with me. I wish they’d have made the right choices 10 years ago so I might instead be working with a modern and fluid OS.
Once upon a time the hardware diversity of the PC ecosystem would have been considered its strength. But nowadays it's clear that the absolute zoo of hardware that Windows has to run on its holding it back.
Spend any time in PC BIOS settings to get a glimpse of the horror. MacOS simply does not have to deal with this shit. Apple can dictate whatever it wants from the hardware and it's there in the next year, with drivers all written by Apple.
Microsoft meanwhile takes decades to whip hardware vendors into shape enough to get (e.g.) a Secure Boot infrastructure in place and it's widely considered a joke because of how bad each manufacturer is at implementing it.
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