Sure, in a purely physical sense, I suppose they could launch a nuke, triggering MAD and Israel's Samson Doctrine and ending human civilization for no reason. Currently I think Israel, the US, North Korea, and Russia have a higher (though still low) risk of doing that. In that order, by the way, though I could probably be convinced to bump Russia up higher.

Fewer, because we would've been deterred from attacking them. Unless we decided to risk nuclear war, I guess.

> If someone says "I used Copilot to..." or "Copilot is great for..." or "Copilot sucks because..." they haven't communicated any useful information to me, because I have no idea what product they are talking about.

I think this is basically a rephrasing of the reason for the shared name. This appears to be an attempt at brand unification.

Microsoft wants user's experiences with their products to blend together into an undifferentiated (in more positive terms, "seamless") set of interactions. Not a set of discrete pieces of software, just interacting with Microsoft via Copilot to... ask it to do their work for them, mostly. This is the AI-native future they're building towards. You complain that users can't talk about what tool they're using. Microsoft doesn't want people knowing or caring what tool they're using. Just pay your subscription and have Copilot read and respond to your email for you.

I find it particularly disappointing as a conclusion because its a strange curveball on what otherwise seemed to be the obvious conclusion it was building to: if we want the open web to survive then it has to be convenient to use. We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual. Approximately nobody wants to spend their time reading a manual to learn to operate a chat application or publish a blog. We even have an opportunity afforded to us by enshitification and declining software quality. The bar is lowering on being the easiest option!

Also we have public fire departments, police and amber alerts, and official organ donor registration systems. This isn't really the a case against state intervention you seem to be going for.

Do you have a mechanism for this in mind, incentives-wise? I can't see this making money.

I don't know for sure, but when enlightenment thinkers pioneered liberal ideology and included in it respect for private property, I don't think they had in mind that the roads and water and means of transportation, communication, the land you live on and the air you breathe being the private property of a totally-not-a-king very smart businessman.

How, exactly, does more and better tech help with the fundamentally sociological issues of power distribution, wealth inequality, surveillance, etc? Are you operating on the assumption that a machine superintelligence will ignore the selfish orders of whoever makes it and immediately work to establish post-scarcity luxury space communism?