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.
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.
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.