Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.

It is perhaps the greatest amplifier of human well-being in history, one of the most effective ways to create tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.

Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!

With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing life’s complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. [...], while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity.

(Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)

It's interesting that someone thought "smoothing life's complexities" is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.

Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out life's complexities without smoothing out people's complexities, but it's not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and that's if it actually worked, which it doesn't).

I've felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole it's hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but it's a shame we couldn't as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).

Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.