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A few weeks after Merriam-Webster named “slop” its Word of the Year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared his thoughts on the future of AI in 2026.
In his signature intellectual style on his personal blog, Nadella wrote that he hopes we stop thinking of AI as “garbage” and start seeing it as a “bicycle for the mind.” He wrote, “A new concept that develops the ‘bicycle for the mind’ into a tool for progress, encouraging us to always see AI as a scaffold for human potential, not a replacement.”
He went on: “We need to move beyond the debate between rough and refined, and build a new balance in our ‘theory of mind’ to explain how humans are equipped with these new cognitive enhancement tools in their interactions with one another.”
If you parse his words carefully, it’s clear that he’s not just urging people to stop dismissing AI-generated content as garbage he’s also hoping the tech industry will stop treating AI as a replacement for humans. He wants the industry to begin seeing it as a productivity tool that augments human work.
But there’s a problem with this framework: the marketing of AI agents largely relies on the idea of replacing human labor to justify pricing and make costs seem reasonable. Meanwhile, some AI leaders have issued warnings that the technology could soon drive very high unemployment. For example, in May of this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could replace half of entry-level white-collar jobs and push the unemployment rate to 10–20% within five years. Last month, he reiterated this warning in an interview on *60 Minutes*.
However, the reality of these doomsday predictions remains unclear. As Nadella implied, most AI tools today do not replace workers they are used by workers (as long as humans are willing to check the accuracy of AI’s work).
MIT’s ongoing Project Iceberg is often cited in studies measuring AI’s economic impact on the workforce. The project estimates that AI is currently capable of performing roughly 11.7% of paid human labor. While many reports suggest AI could replace nearly 12% of jobs, the project clarifies that its estimate refers to how much work could potentially be outsourced to AI. Then it calculates the wages associated with those outsourced tasks. Examples include automating nurses’ paperwork and AI-generated computer code.
This doesn’t mean AI has seriously impacted every job. According to an article on Substack called *Blood in the Machine*, corporate graphic designers and marketing bloggers are two examples. Similarly, unemployment remains high for entry-level programmers fresh out of college.
Yet it’s undeniable that skilled artists, writers, and programmers using AI tools produce work that’s often superior to those without these skills. AI still cannot replace human creativity.
As we move into 2026, some data suggest that the professions making the greatest progress with AI are actually thriving not surprisingly. A report from Vanguard Group forecasting the 2026 economy found that “roughly 100 of the occupations most susceptible to AI automation are outperforming the rest of the labor market in terms of employment growth and real wage growth.” The report concludes that those who know how to use AI effectively are making themselves more valuable, not more replaceable.
Ironically, Microsoft’s moves last year may have fueled the narrative that “AI will steal our jobs.” The company laid off over 15,000 employees in 2025, despite record high revenue and profit in the previous fiscal year (ending in June), which it credited to AI success. Nadella even wrote a public memo on the layoffs after the earnings announcement.
Notably, he did not say that internal AI efficiency improvements caused the layoffs. But he did say Microsoft needed to “reimagine our mission in the new era” and listed “AI transformation” as one of three core business priorities in this era (the other two being security and quality). The truth about AI-driven unemployment in 2025 is far more complex. As the Vanguard report notes, it’s less about AI efficiency and more about conventional business decisions that may be less attractive to investors like halting investment in slow-growth areas in favor of fast-growing ones.
Fairly speaking, Microsoft is not the only company developing AI while laying off staff. According to CNBC, research from Challenger, Gray & Christmas shows that this technology is expected to have displaced nearly 55,000 U.S. workers by 2025. The report also notes that Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft, and other tech firms conducted large scale layoffs last year, even as they actively developed AI.
To be fair, those of us who spend too much time on social media watching memes and AI generated short videos might think that “garbage” is one of the most entertaining uses of AI even if not the best.