If, like me, you have a personal Microsoft 365 subscription you'll have received an email telling you that the cost of your annual subscription was going from A$109 to A$159.
(Actually I didn't get the email, not right away, it was only when J told me about her price increase email I went looking and found that Outlook - bless its little cotton socks - had classified the email as junk - go figure.)
Well, I hissed and swore, but I had expected an increase in part to our dollar doing one of its periodic nosedives in value. I did think an A$50 increase a bit steep, but I guessed that Microsoft had been listening to some of these catastrophising exchange rate analysts - the same ones that told us last year that our dollar would go up in value - and decided to hedge its bets, and I must admit I didn't really read the email properly.
Now, I need Microsoft 365.
I use One Note extensively - while I used to use Evernote to manage my research material I've moved over to One Note as a note management tool, and the 1TB of storage comes in handy given I've a vast number of photographs of artefacts.
And I've found that while Libre Office will happily do 95% of everything you can reasonably do with Office, it doesn't cope that well with weird macro dominated data recording spreadsheets and grant application forms using equally weird templates and mandating strange fonts.
So, Microsoft 365 it is - and that's why both my desk and work laptop use windows despite my liking for both linux and parsimonious solutions to recording data in the field
But when I read the email carefully, I saw that part of the increase was to pay for the AI features Microsoft was building into its applications.
Now, I'm a cynic about AI, and a lot of it seems quite immature and singularly useless.
It certainly doesn't need to be everywhere, and being offered the option to generate a summary of my credit card statement or an email about a nineteenth century coronial inquest is not helpful.
However, I will admit that while the little search summaries sometimes generated by Google's Gemini a few months ago were useless, recently, they've improved, and when researching nineteenth century medical instrument manufacturers they've been reasonably useful, providing you read critically and are alert for the odd howler.
I havn't used Microsoft's equivalent product, but I have no reason to believe their products have not followed a similar trajectory, and may prove useful to me in what I do, which does involve quite a bit of web based research.
So, while I'll hiss and groan, I'll put up with it.
I suspect that most users of Office don't really need the brave new world of AI, but then it's always been the case that 90% of Office users only use 10% or the features - the problem has been guessing which features are the key 10% - so no change there.
What does worry me are the adverts appearing on TV (it'll soon be the start of the school year here in Australia) about how CoPilot and CoPilot based PC's will help students power through assignments, and in one advert, the actor playing a uni student is shown asking CoPilot to cite her sources.
I'm sorry, if you want to do research oriented work, you need to learn to do research, learn to critically read your sources, and weigh up their validity, in short you need to learn to think for yourself.
AI is a tool, not a panacea.
And as for the students and their clever PCs, I keep on thinking about when I learned to sail yachts and they made us learn to do some very basic astronomical and solar navigation, because, as the course tutor said, when you're out on the ocean and the electrical system has died taking out the GPS, how are you going to find your way home?
The same goes for outsourcing your thinking to a machine ...
