Weeks after Merriam-Webster named “slop” the word of the year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella offered his thoughts on what to expect from AI in 2026.
In classic intellectual style, Nadella wrote on his personal blog that he wants us to stop thinking of AI as a “hill” and start thinking of it as a “bicycle of the mind.”
“A new concept that evolves the ‘bicycle of the mind’ to always think of AI not as a replacement but as a scaffolding for human potential,” he wrote.
He added: “We need to move beyond the vulgar vs. sophisticated debate and forge a new equilibrium in terms of a ‘theory of mind’ that explains how humans have these new cognitive amplification tools in their interactions with each other.”
If you parse these syllables, you might realize that he’s not only asking everyone to stop thinking of AI-generated content as vulgar, but also asking 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 to assist humans.
However, there are problems with this framework. Much of the marketing of AI agents uses the idea of replacing human labor as a way to set prices and justify their costs.
Meanwhile, some of the biggest names in the AI field are warning that the technology will soon lead to extremely high levels of human unemployment. For example, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned in May that AI could replace half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and cause unemployment to rise between 10% and 20% over the next five years, and doubled down on that claim in an interview on 60 Minutes last month.
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However, it is unclear at this time how true these doomsday statistics are. As Nadella suggests, most AI tools today are used by workers rather than replacing them (unless humans don’t mind checking the accuracy of the AI’s work).
One frequently cited research study is MIT’s ongoing Project Iceberg, which seeks to measure the economic impact on employment of bringing AI into the workforce. Project Iceberg estimates that AI can currently perform approximately 11.7% of paid human labor.
It has been widely reported that AI could replace nearly 12% of jobs, but what the project is actually estimating is how many jobs could be delegated to AI. Then calculate the wages associated with that offloaded work. Interestingly, example tasks include automated paperwork for nurses and computer code written with AI.
That’s not to say there aren’t jobs that will be significantly impacted by AI. According to Substack called Blood in the Machine, corporate graphic artists and marketing bloggers are two examples. Furthermore, the unemployment rate for junior programmers who are new graduates is also high.
But it’s also true that highly skilled artists, writers, and programmers produce better work with AI tools than their less skilled counterparts. AI cannot yet replace human creativity.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that as we head into 2026, some data is emerging that shows that the jobs most advanced in AI are actually thriving. Vanguard’s 2026 Economic Forecast report found that “the approximately 100 occupations most exposed to AI automation are actually outperforming the rest of the labor market in terms of employment growth and real wage growth.”
The Vanguard report concludes that people who leverage AI skillfully are making themselves more valuable, rather than fungible.
The irony is that Microsoft’s own actions last year helped create the narrative that AI will take our jobs. The company laid off more than 15,000 people in 2025, despite posting record sales and profits in the previous fiscal year that ended in June. He cited success with AI as the reason. Mr. Nadella even wrote a public memo about the layoffs in response to these results.
Notably, he did not say that internal AI efficiencies led to layoffs. But he said Microsoft needs to “reimagine our mission for a new era,” and cited “AI transformation” as one of the company’s three business objectives for this era (the other two being security and quality).
The truth about AI-induced job losses during 2025 is more nuanced. As Vanguard’s report points out, this has less to do with the efficiency of internal AI and more to do with normal business practices that are of little interest to investors, such as disinvesting in slowing areas and piling into growth areas.
To be fair, Microsoft wasn’t the only company to lay off employees while pursuing AI. According to a report by CNBC, the technology is said to be responsible for about 55,000 layoffs in the United States in 2025, according to a study by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The report cited Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft and other AI-chasing technology companies as having made significant job cuts last year.
And to be fair to Slop, those of us who spend way more time than we should on social media laughing at memes and AI-generated short videos might argue that Slop is also one of the funniest (if not the best) uses of AI.
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