A couple of weeks after Merriam-Webster named “slop” as its word of the year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella weighed in on what to expect from AI in 2026.
In his classic, intellectual style, Nadella wrote on his personal blog that he wants us to stop thinking of AI as “slop” and start thinking of it as “bicycles for the mind.”
He wrote, “A new concept that evolves ‘bicycles for the mind’ such that we always think of AI as a scaffolding for human potential vs a substitute.”
He continued: “We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our ‘theory of the mind’ that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other.”
If you parse through those syllables, you may see that he’s not only urging everyone to stop thinking of AI-generated content as slop, but 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 human-helper productivity tool instead.
Here’s the problem with that framing, though: Much of AI agent marketing 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 have been sounding the alarm that the tech will soon cause very high levels of human unemployment. For instance, in May Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could take away half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, raising unemployment to 10-20% over the next five years, and he doubled down on that last month in an interview on 60 Minutes.
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Yet we currently don’t know how true such doomsday stats 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 AI’s work for accuracy).
One oft-cited research study is MIT’s ongoing Project Iceberg, which seeks to measure the economic impact on jobs as AI enters the workforce. Project Iceberg estimates that AI is currently capable of performing about 11.7% of human paid labor.
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