A few weeks after Merriam-Webster named “slop” its word of the year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella looked at what to expect from artificial intelligence in 2026.
In his classic, intellectual style, Nadella wrote on it personal blog that he wants us to stop thinking of AI as “evil” and start thinking of it as “bikes for the mind.”
He wrote, “A new concept is evolving ‘bicycles for the mind’, so that we always think of AI as a scaffold for human potential versus a substitute.”
He continued: “We need to get past the slop vs. complexity arguments and develop a new balance in terms of our ‘theory of mind’ that explains that humans are equipped with these new cognitive enhancer tools as we relate to each other.”
If you analyze these syllables, you can see that not only is he urging everyone to stop thinking of AI-generated content as dumb, but he also wants the tech industry to stop talking about AI as a replacement for humans. He hopes the industry will start talking about it as a productivity tool that helps people.
Here’s the problem with this framework, though: Much of the marketing of AI agents uses the idea of replacing human labor as a way to price it and justify its expense.
Meanwhile, some of the biggest names in AI are sounding the alarm that the technology will soon cause very high levels of human unemployment. For example, in May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could take away half of key jobs, driving unemployment to 10-20% over the next five years, and he doubled down on this last month in an interview on 60 Minutes.
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However, we currently do not know how true these disaster statistics are. As Nadella implies, most AI tools today don’t replace workers, they are used by them (as long as the human doesn’t mind checking the accuracy of the AI’s work).
An oft-cited research study is underway at MIT Project Icebergwhich seeks to measure the economic impact on jobs as artificial intelligence enters the workforce. Project Iceberg estimates that AI is currently capable of performing about 11.7% of human paid work.
While it has been widely reported that AI is capable of replacing almost 12% of jobs, the Project says that what it actually estimates is how much of a task can be offloaded to AI. It then calculates the wages associated with that offloaded job. It is interesting that the works he cites as examples includes automated paperwork for nurses and computer code written with artificial intelligence.
That’s not to say that there aren’t jobs heavily impacted by AI. Corporate graphic designers and marketing bloggers are two examples, according to a Substack called Blood on the machine. Then there are the high unemployment rates among the younger ranks of coders.
But it’s also true that highly skilled artists, writers, and programmers produce better work with AI tools than those who lack the skills. Artificial intelligence cannot yet replace human creativity.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that as we slide into 2026, some data is emerging that shows that the jobs where AI has made the most progress are actually booming. Vanguard Financial Forecast Report 2026 found that “the 100 or so occupations most exposed to AI automation are actually outperforming the rest of the labor market in terms of job growth and real wage increases.”
The Vanguard report concludes that those who use AI masterfully make themselves more valuable, not replaceable.
The irony is that Microsoft’s own actions last year helped create the AI-is-coming-for-our-jobs narrative. The company was fired over 15,000 people in 2025even though it recorded record revenues and profits for the last fiscal year, which ended in June — citing success with artificial intelligence as a reason. Nadella even wrote a public note for the redundancies following these results.
Notably, he did not say that AI’s internal efficiency led to cuts. But he he said that Microsoft needed to “redesign our mission for a new era” and named “AI transformation” as one of the company’s three business goals in this era (the other two being security and quality).
The truth about job loss attributed to artificial intelligence in 2025 is more nuanced. As the Vanguard report points out, this had less to do with the effectiveness of the internal AI and more to do with ordinary business practices that are less exciting to investors, such as ending investments in slowing regions and piling into growing ones.
To be fair, Microsoft wasn’t alone in laying off workers while pursuing artificial intelligence. Technology is said to be responsible for nearly 55,000 layoffs in the US by 2025, according to research by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. CNBC reported. That report cited big cuts last year at Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft and other tech companies chasing artificial intelligence.
And to be fair, those of us who spend more time than we should on social media laughing at AI-generated memes and short-form videos might argue that slop is also one of the funnest (if not the best) uses of AI.
