Thank you Microsoft, just what I always wanted. Hard to believe this is real.
Thank you Microsoft, just what I always wanted. Hard to believe this is real.
Actual Ad Link: https://www.instagram.com/microsoft365/p/C7j8ipnxIiI/?img_index=1
Awesome article about the ad which sums it up nicely:
https://justinpot.com/watch-me-be-in-three-meetings-at-once/
Three meetings at once. It’s so funny that, when I saw people making fun of it, I assumed it was a meme or an Onion parody. Nope: Microsoft really did run this as an ad on Instagram. This is what they think we want from their supposedly world-changing technology: the ability to attend more meetings.
Now, Copilot’s ability to transcribe a meeting and highlight the key points is cool, and in theory it could make meetings more efficient. It’s easy to imagine, in a healthy work culture, where that gain in time allows people to spend more time doing the actually productive parts of their job.
Instead this ad assumes the opposite will happen. It imagines a future where we use our efficiency gains to attend more meetings. Economists sometimes talk about how the current crop of technology hasn’t lead to commensurate productivity gains—it’s a bit of a mystery in some circles. I would hold up this ad as the explanation: we are all, as a society, using the efficiency gains to attend more pointless meetings.
Some asshole on LinkedIn is creaming his khakis over this
What this will mean is middle management will fire all the line managers. Your only contact with management will be through one of their AI's.
[Robot Voice] Work harder! Your vacation is denied. Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions! There's no way your solution will work. Drive this bus off the cliff or find another job! Write a 15-page self-assessment of your accomplishments this quarter. Your performance review is 0 out of 5. Your pay is cut 10%. No, I did not read your self-assessment. I didn't have time. Our company has failed. I'm giving myself a $2M severance. You are fired.
That was both wild and entirely accurate at the same time.
I already had our CEO send us a speech video of him made with ML during a all-hands, although he said just afterwards it was made with ML. I fully expect this to become the norm in the future, even if we can tell the uncannyness for a while, they will not care.
Iike those encouraging videos of N+5, N+6 and all the way up to N+13 (been there, sleeped through them).
Who actually listens to the dravel? Is it just so bosses can feel meaningful?
So Copilot is going to make me a transcript of a meeting that could have just been an email to begin with? Brilliant.
No, it's going to make assumptions about what was important in that meeting and try to bullet point it. And that won't actually work well enough to count on, and if it misses something, you won't know.
I also can't imagine many managers will be happy about this, because the whole point of calling a meeting is that they want your attention. After a manager ends up lecturing a meeting full of bots a couple times, and someone misses something that was brought up in a meeting they ostensibly attended, they'll complain, and IT will be instructed to block it.
And I can't exactly blame them, honestly. I'm not fan of unnecessary meetings but if I'm managing a team of people, I'd want to know I'm engaging with them, not Copilot.
And as an employee, I'm not about to let an AI be caught doing any part of my job, because that's just giving management "ideas"
It’s going to be a bunch of AIs sitting around spewing bullshit since all the humans sent their AIs to the meeting.
Reminds me of this scene in Real Genius:
Remember when AI was going to free us up to do better things? LOL just kidding, 3 meetings at once.
I remember when llms were used to simulate subreddits as a singular entity leading to pretty funny results. Wish we could've put a pin in it there.
AI, allowing corporate bureaucracy and inefficiency to continue to grow unscathed.
I already don't trust AI, there's no way I'd want it to be the arbiter of potentially critical job-related information in a workplace. For probably less money than licensing and running an AI, a company could just hire a stenographer to sit in meetings all day, take notes, and send those notes to concerned parties. Better yet, why not get certain people to send info directly via email, instead of scheduling a bunch a pointless meetings. How's that for innovation
Right? If an LLM can transcribe all the useful information out of a meeting, it stands to reason that the entire meeting could just be boiled to an email, instead of enabling middle managers to feel useful by tying up other people's time.
It's easier to understand this through the lens of the bosses who actually buy this technology. They're only in meetings. They kind of assume that's what their workers do, too. They want their workers in more meetings; if that's all you're doing, it sounds like being productive.
The workers aren't buying copilot, and the people who are buying it find this somewhat convincing.
Matches my experience in bigger companies. People who have a “mostly meetings and PowerPoint” job think that sitting in meetings is real productive work. They assume anyone who sits in front of a computer but not in a meeting is probably not busy enough and their job could be outsourced to India.
Even the woman on the ad looks “whelmed” and disappointed in the world of tech. I feel like behind those eyes there are thoughts of quitting and moving to Idaho to raise sheep.
Definitely looks like the AI has been sending her transcripts of the vacation it's been attending with her family.
Uh, I think she may be a bit too "ethnic" for the vast majority of Idaho.
Disclaimer
Please note that I am not condoning this sentiment, merely calling out Idaho for being majority backwoods regressive.
Also she may be imagining the shitstorm her mother would give her if she did.
It's quite accurate: Microsoft consulted its ethnographic map of the world for marketers, and it clearly shows black, white, brown and yellow faces predominating on every continent.
Copilot’s ability to transcribe a meeting and highlight the key points
And then send it as an email to all participants. 😂
Or sending a meeting invite to talk with AI voice about the key points.
She looks thrilled
It makes sense if you assume it's actually targeted at managers who want their employees to be in three meetings at once.
They are ALMOST advocating for over-employment.
They weren't? Huh
I want an "me" AI that can answer the phone, order groceries delivered, send generated photos of me to everyone at Christmas...
And work remotely on my behalf.
It shows just how fundamentally out of touch MS is with, well, everything.
What you see is a dystopian view of the direction we're headed with AI due to capitalism. What I see is another way to keep 3 bullshit jobs without being able to wfh
Don't forget to copyright yourself.
I predict that they will track everything everyone does and make a borg ai out of their employees.
Not exactly related to this, but I can't wait for our eventual AI avatars to sit in meetings for us so they can lay us off and have our AI avatar literally take our job, likeness, and persona.
There's a montage scene in 'Real Genius' where a student is going through freshman year at a college. The first time he goes into a particular classroom there are ten students one one tape recorder. Each time he arrives there are more recorders, until finally there's nothing but recorders and the professor has left a tape machine of his own to play the lecture.
Yes, Val Kilmer was in another movie besides Tombstone!
Is that what sovcits are doing
I've been working to find a way to give my personal to AI. toxic assholery for everyone
As someone familiar with Microsoft's meeting culture, this is pretty accurate. If you want to attend every meeting in the day, you will be in three meetings at once. At a minimum.
and in theory it could make meetings more efficient.
How about making an agenda for the meeting, sticking to the agenda, and sending out a copy of the proceedings to every attendant and other who need it?
If you have a meeting without these things it's not a meeting. Its a gathering of people talking about vaguely similar interests.
Fixing the meeting culture is easier than inventing technology to decoy bad leadership.
Not even the lady in the ad looks happy about this lol
That last section of the article you highlighted makes me think about Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. Imagine if everyone going to bullshit meetings actually did something productive for society, or did something that they themselves found fulfilling. Makes me sad.
Imagine if everyone going to bullshit meetings actually did something productive for society, or did something that they themselves found fulfilling.
At some point I've decided this is at least 25% of the point of most of the Star Trek storylines, and I'm here for it, sadness and all.
Shit, even Star Trek understood the idea of "hey can we make this a voice call instead of a meeting so I can literally stop the ship from exploding while we hash out the menu for the shipwide picnic".
The great thing about working from home is I can do something else while I'm in meetings.
It's fun to think about a world in which all software is open source.
And maybe there aren't a million developers each building their own password reset functions and website search fields and stuff.
Even understanding that marketing people tend to be a different breed, I cannot comprehend someone who would think "we can put you in more meetings" is this super compelling pitch.
Like even accepting the premise that this works (which I don't really), there would be any number of ads to be made about how Copilot can attend meetings for you, and you can just keep working instead and not have to be bothered with it. But no somebody made the ad thinking that increasing the meetings was the part that people are gonna get excited about.
Like even accepting the premise that this works (which I don’t really), there would be any number of ads to be made about how Copilot can attend meetings for you, and you can just keep working instead and not have to be bothered with it. But no somebody made the ad thinking that increasing the meetings was the part that people are gonna get excited about.
I feel like this is the same guy who told the Kellogg's CEO to suggest that folks struggling to pay higher prices for basics should try cereal for some meals.
Meeting for the meetings meeting
Yo dawg, i heard you like meetings.
We just aren't all seeing that it's worth it to rip all the material out of the planet. Craft it a great expense into complex machines and burn our very ancestors for fuel.
So that a speech to text bot that takes imagined assumptions at exponentially more power can write an email that could be done by a person who could also do more complex tasks or hell even fetch a coffee.
Tech bros just trying to figure out why it's a good thing to get rid of people they just don't like from being around them and make it seem like a good thing. And I say that as someone that likes tech and often doesn't like people.
This is so stupid.
I don't want to be even in one meeting at a time without camera on.
AI will be used to conduct three meetings at the same time. Employees will still be expected to personally attend all of them.
We were afraid of totally extermination by AI. Reality is worst and boring, as usual
Exactly what I want from technology. More work and more responsibilities. It could be smooth sailing and 10 hour weeks for all of us, but thanks to the gracious overlords we're slaving our lives away. Technology, eh? Isn't it great.
i actually was in 2 recently, but one wasn't important and i muted it when a colleague started showing slides. wouldn't recommend either way.
This is not what they think we want. This is what the KNOW companies wants, as they'll be their primary revenue from massive contracts.
Sup dawg
I dunno, I kinda like this one.
I keep getting roped into 30-60 minute long meetings, where what was discussed could have been summarised into a few points.
What I don't like, is that the content is stored/processed outside of a corporate network.
Remember, you've already got the generation of folks who watched the transition to computers that were supposed to make their lives "easier" become instead "you are expected to do far more with your workday because we made it easier for you."
Right now it looks like "wow it will lighten my workload" but what it will look like in the end is "now we can expect more productivity per the same unit time from our workers."
I'd love to be wrong, but 1% gonna 1%.
I need OBS on the new work-macbook to fix issues with the weird colors of my webcam, but the added benefit was that I can now use it to record myself "listening to what's being said" for the first 2 minutes of the meeting which I then replay on a loop for the rest of the meeting, while I'm making coffee and eating breakfast. Works great so far.
I keep getting roped into 30-60 minute long meetings, where what was discussed could have been summarised into a few points
Which is what people would want, just get an email summary of the meeting if you don't actually need to be there. The ad is saying you'd still need to go anyway and now because you're not expected to pay so much attention you can be booked into two more at the same time.
Rather than just getting 3 email summaries.
