Satya Nadella explains the 4 billion typist fallacy: treating AI agents as a separate labor pool repeats the mistake people made about computers in the 1980s "So that's why I kind of still think that, you know, going and thinking of these as somehow living outside of the realm of human agency is probably not the right way to think about it." "In fact, the way to perhaps conceive it, like let's say in early 80s, if somebody had come to us and said, well, 4 billion people are gonna wake up every morning and start typing, you would have said, why, right?" "You know, we have a typist pool that's good enough. We don't need 4 billion people." "But that's what happened. Like we invented this entire class of thing called knowledge work." The PC did not scale by preserving a small typist pool. It made typing universal and created knowledge work on top. Satya's edge is that agents may follow the same path. The bottleneck moves from performing every task to supplying intent, judgment, and accountability. - Satya Nadella (@satyanadella), Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, at the World Economic Forum (@wef)