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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.
You left out the biggest criticism which has nothing to do with AI, at least explicitly.
The "It's my fucking computer, and it'll do what I tell it and nothing more" people. Even before Windows was to become an "agentic AI platform", it was enshittifying with ads, endless features nobody asked for that slowed your computer to a crawl, and it's proposed "Windows Recall" feature had more red flags for privacy advocates than Mamdani's victory party. Windows debloat utilities are common, popular, and at constant war with Microsoft who consistently breaks them. Right before I put Linux on my wife's computer, she was complaining that she couldn't do anything on it. Low and behold "Windows Telemetry" was pegging the CPU at 100% utilization. No fucking clue how it pulled that off.
I'm sure the fact that it's AI doesn't help MIcrosoft's case here. But if they hadn't been nakedly fucking up Windows, more people might have a wait and see approach. As it stands, most people rightly expect this push to be something that makes Windows much slower, breaks a bunch of shit, gets turned on every feature update without being asked, and just generally makes their computer much more frustrating to use. And it'll probably be somehow worse than all of that to boot.
Just give me windows XP back. Microsoft still supports it for large institutional clients like the US military and the Louvre's security system, why can't it be available to the general public?
wait, the military still uses XP? Isn't that really bad for security?
MS still employs a meaningful number of engineers dedicated to security patches for XP.
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