#reverse centaurs

[insearchofsecrets]

STOP THIS

This is a real website, guys. This is actually happening. https://pauseai.info/

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox

ITHACA and NYC! I'm heading your way for a zillion events from Sept 11-17. Here's a list of open-to-all CORNELL activities including two major keynotes; a movie night with dinner and discussion; and a public event at CORNELL TECH in NYC. I'm also appearing at BUFFALO STREET BOOKS on Sept 11 and at AUTUMN LEAVES BOOKS on Sept 13. I'll also be at the BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL on Sept 21:

The most ENSHITTIFICATION-PROOF way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do AN END RUN around the AMAZON/AUDIBLE AUDIOBOOK MONOPOLY and DISENSHITTIFY your audiobook experience in the process.

My latest Locus column is "Reverse Centaurs," and it sets out to unravel a paradox: how is it that some AI's users describe their experience as a hellish ordeal, while others delight in the ways that AI is changing their lives for the better?

https://locusmag.com/2025/09/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/

The answer is contained in the concept of "centaurs" and "reverse centaurs," found in automation theory:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

A "centaur" is a human being who is assisted by a machine (a human head on a strong and tireless body). A reverse centaur is a machine that uses a human being as its assistant (a frail and vulnerable person being puppeteered by an uncaring, relentless machine).

Let me give you an example: remember at the start of the summer, when Hearst published a summer reading guide that was full of nonexistent books that had been "hallucinated" by a chatbot?

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405022/fake-summer-reading-list-ai

404 Media's Jason Koebler got in touch with the guy whose byline appeared on the list, and he was hugely embarrassed and contrite:

https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/

But in a followup story, Koebler noticed something that the first round of dunks and memes about this poor guy had missed: this same writer had his name on many of these "best of the summer" lists in this supplement. He was practically the sole author of an entire 64-page insert:

https://www.404media.co/viral-ai-generated-summer-guide-printed-by-chicago-sun-times-was-made-by-magazine-giant-hearst/

And that's where it gets interesting. Koebler got his start in journalism as an intern at the Washington Monthly, where he worked on lists like these:

https://www.404media.co/podcast-ai-slop-summer/

When Koebler was doing this work, he'd be part of a team of three interns, overseen by an experienced journalist, backstopped by an extensive fact-checking department. Those little lists take a surprising amount of work, if you really care about their quality.

The freelance writer who authored this giant summer reading guide with all its lists had been tasked with doing the work of literally dozens of writers, editors and fact-checkers. We don't know whether his boss told him he had to use AI, but there's no way one writer could do all that work without AI.

In other words, that writer's job wasn't to write the article. His job was to be the "human in the loop" for an AI that wrote the articles, but on a schedule and with a workload that precluded his being able to do a good job. It's more true to say that his job was to be the AI's "accountability sink" (in the memorable phrasing of Dan Davies): he was being paid to take the blame for the AI's mistakes.

He was, in other words, a reverse centaur.

Now, I am a freelance writer as well, and not so long ago, I wanted to quote something smart I'd heard on a podcast in an article, but I couldn't remember where I heard it. So I downloaded Whisper, an open source AI transcription model from Openai, to my laptop. I threw the last 30 hours' worth of audio that I'd listened to at it, and worked away on other stuff for an hour or two. When I checked again, I had a folder full of pretty reliable transcripts. I searched the text, found the quote, and opened the audio to the supplied timecode to double-check it. I was a centaur. I got to decide how to use the AI, and I only had to use it in ways that made my work better and more satisfying.

This, I think, is the explanation for the paradox of AI: the AI users who are being immiserated and precaratized by bosses who have been convinced to fire their colleagues and pile their work on the terrorized survivors of the layoffs hate the AI, because it makes their life worse in every way.

Whereas the people who choose when and how to use AI – the centaurs – are only using AI to the extent that it is useful, and throwing it away when it's not. They may make poor choices about the AI, but those choices are theirs, they are not imposed from on high. A bicyclist who chooses to commute on two wheels can have a glorious ride, or they can ride like a maniac and end up eating dirt, but they are having a fundamentally different experience from, say, a gig delivery platform rider who has been given an impossible quota and is having their pay eroded by algorithmic wage discrimination:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

I was very happy to put this analysis in the pages of Locus, the trade magazine for the science fiction field. The job of a science fiction writer is only incidentally to describe what a technology does – at its best, science fiction interrogates who the technology does it to and who the technology does it for.

This is a political act of resistance. Margaret Thatcher's motto, after all, was "There is no alternative," by which she meant, "Stop trying to think of alternatives." The bully's trick is to present your defeat as a fait accompli: "Resistance is futile."

Tech bosses practice a form of vulgar Thatcherism all the time: Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think there's no way to talk with your friends without letting him listen in; Sundar Pichai wants you to think there's no way to search the web without being spied on; Tim Cook wants you to think there's no way to have a safe and reliable computing experience without giving him a veto over which software you install; Satya Nadella wants you to think there's no way for you to edit a Word file without letting your boss compare your keystrokes-per-minute to your co-workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

And AI bosses want you to think that the only way to use these tools is to displace and immiserate labor, because that's the promise they raise investment capital on:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype

AI is a bubble. If it wasn't a bubble – if it was just a bunch of computer scientists and product teams tinkering with possible uses for advancements in back-propagation, generative adversarial networks and machine learning – there wouldn't be any controversy here. A programmer who uses a chatbot to autogen a bunch of cross-browser CSS stylesheets that mostly work, after some tinkering, would maybe mention that fact over beers – but they wouldn't get sucked into a cult obsessed with outlandish scenarios in which the chatbot wakes up and turns us all into paperclips:

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636

AI is a bubble. Bubbles burst. We're in for a near-total collapse of the AI investment mania. Most of these companies will fail. Many planned data-centers will never be opened. Many existing data-centers will be shuttered. When that happens, what will be left?

AI is a bubble, and when bubbles burst, they sometimes leave behind a productive residue. At home, I enjoy 2GB symmetrical fiber optic internet, because AT&T was able to light up some of the dark fiber that Worldcom fraudulently raised billions for. Worldcom's CEO died in prison after scamming the finances of ordinary people, and the world would be a better place if that had never happened, but there was some productive residue left behind, and many of us are reaping the benefit today:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Contrast that with the cryptocurrency bubble. When that bursts, we'll still have a smattering of programmers who've had a subsidized education in cryptography and secure programming in Rust, but mostly what crypto will leave behind is bad Austrian economics and worse monkey JPEGs. Like Enron, crypto will leave nothing much behind of any value.

All bubbles are bad, but some are more productive than others. When the AI bubble bursts, there will be stellar bargains on GPUs (it would be ironic if scientists snapped them up at pennies on the dollar and used them for climate modeling). We'll have a lot of technical people who are much better at applied statistics than they were a decade ago. And there will be the open source models, like Whisper, the tool I used to transcribe all those podcasts.

These open source models run on commodity hardware, and while the climate costs of creating those models is terrible, they're here now, and operating them isn't especially energy-intensive. When I used Whisper to transcribe 30 hours' worth of podcasts, my laptop's fan didn't even switch on.

What's more, open source hackers are doing amazing things with these tools – far more than the giant corporations that released them ever anticipated. These "toy" models were released as a way to entice programmers into specializing in cloud systems operated by the big tech companies, but it turns out that these standalone models can do amazing things, and aren't just a demo for a big, doomed foundation model:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

It doesn't matter what happens to Openai; Whisper is here to stay. It's already being rolled into other standard tools – the latest version of ffmpeg integrates Whisper and can autogen captions:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/ffmpeg_8_huffman/

The things these open source standalone models can do will only expand, and they will become a given for our computing applications. Your computer or phone will be able to transcribe audio and do cool image-editing stuff like erasing strangers from the background of a photo as a standard feature.

That's the good news. The bad news is all the damage the bubble is doing now and all the further damage that will come from its collapse. Today, we're getting the climate impact, obviously, and the immiseration of all those workers who are being reverse-centaured by an AI that can't do their job, but whose manufacturer's salesforce convinced their boss to fire them and replace them with an AI anyway.

After the bubble bursts, there will be the mass incineration of everyday people's retirement savings and the knock-on effects as the whole market craters. And long after that, there will be the terrible impact on our society's ability to do things, as defunct foundation models grind to a halt, after the people they replaced are long gone and can't step in to pick up the work they fumble. We are busily filling the walls of society with digital asbestos and we'll be digging it out for generations to come.

Every day the bubble persists, the harms of today and tomorrow increase. We need to burst that bubble as soon as possible. That's how I came to spend the summer writing a book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux with the working title The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, whose goal is to improve the quality of AI criticism so that it inflicts maximum damage on AI swindlers and their terrible investment bubble.

It'll be out in 2026, but for now, you can have a look at my Locus column:

https://locusmag.com/2025/09/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/

Click here to pre-order my next book, ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI can’t do your job

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman (Elon Musk) can convince your boss (the USA) to fire you and replace you (a federal worker) with a chatbot that can't do your job:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/amid-job-cuts-doge-accelerates-rollout-of-ai-tool-to-automate-government

If you pay attention to the hype, you'd think that all the action on "AI" (an incoherent grab-bag of only marginally related technologies) was in generating text and images. Man, is that ever wrong. The AI hype machine could put every commercial illustrator alive on the breadline and the savings wouldn't pay the kombucha budget for the million-dollar-a-year techies who oversaw Dall-E's training run. The commercial market for automated email summaries is likewise infinitesimal.

The fact that CEOs overestimate the size of this market is easy to understand, since "CEO" is the most laptop job of all laptop jobs. Having a chatbot summarize the boss's email is the 2025 equivalent of the 2000s gag about the boss whose secretary printed out the boss's email and put it in his in-tray so he could go over it with a red pen and then dictate his reply.

The smart AI money is long on "decision support," whereby a statistical inference engine suggests to a human being what decision they should make. There's bots that are supposed to diagnose tumors, bots that are supposed to make neutral bail and parole decisions, bots that are supposed to evaluate student essays, resumes and loan applications.

The narrative around these bots is that they are there to help humans. In this story, the hospital buys a radiology bot that offers a second opinion to the human radiologist. If they disagree, the human radiologist takes another look. In this tale, AI is a way for hospitals to make fewer mistakes by spending more money. An AI assisted radiologist is less productive (because they re-run some x-rays to resolve disagreements with the bot) but more accurate.

In automation theory jargon, this radiologist is a "centaur" – a human head grafted onto the tireless, ever-vigilant body of a robot

Of course, no one who invests in an AI company expects this to happen. Instead, they want reverse-centaurs: a human who acts as an assistant to a robot. The real pitch to hospital is, "Fire all but one of your radiologists and then put that poor bastard to work reviewing the judgments our robot makes at machine scale."

No one seriously thinks that the reverse-centaur radiologist will be able to maintain perfect vigilance over long shifts of supervising automated process that rarely go wrong, but when they do, the error must be caught:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

The role of this "human in the loop" isn't to prevent errors. That human's is there to be blamed for errors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/#is-also-a-human-in-the-loop

The human is there to be a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

The human is there to be an "accountability sink":

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

But they're not there to be radiologists.

This is bad enough when we're talking about radiology, but it's even worse in government contexts, where the bots are deciding who gets Medicare, who gets food stamps, who gets VA benefits, who gets a visa, who gets indicted, who gets bail, and who gets parole.

That's because statistical inference is intrinsically conservative: an AI predicts the future by looking at its data about the past, and when that prediction is also an automated decision, fed to a Chaplinesque reverse-centaur trying to keep pace with a torrent of machine judgments, the prediction becomes a directive, and thus a self-fulfilling prophecy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

AIs want the future to be like the past, and AIs make the future like the past. If the training data is full of human bias, then the predictions will also be full of human bias, and then the outcomes will be full of human bias, and when those outcomes are copraphagically fed back into the training data, you get new, highly concentrated human/machine bias:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

By firing skilled human workers and replacing them with spicy autocomplete, Musk is assuming his final form as both the kind of boss who can be conned into replacing you with a defective chatbot and as the fast-talking sales rep who cons your boss. Musk is transforming key government functions into high-speed error-generating machines whose human minders are only the payroll to take the fall for the coming tsunami of robot fuckups.

This is the equivalent to filling the American government's walls with asbestos, turning agencies into hazmat zones that we can't touch without causing thousands to sicken and die:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/19/failure-cascades/#dirty-data

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk

They turned the cottage into a factory.

This is truly the opposite of steampunk. Somehow, our bosses have invented a form of craft-labor — where you work from your own vehicle or home, using equipment you pay for — that has all the humiliations, dangers and petty authoritarianism of the industrial factory.

This is the worst of both worlds. Under the New Deal, factory workers teamed up with progressive regulators to force the owners of giant factories to share the efficiency gains of the assemblyline, creating the “Large-Firm Wage Premium” (where workers at big companies made more money, not less).

Today, the large-firm wage premium is dead. Workers are moving out of the factory, back into their homes (and cars), but those homes and cars are being transformed into factories, thanks to the camera- and mic-studded digital devices that monitor workers more closely than even the meanest, pettiest foreman could.

It needn’t be this way. The Luddites presaged the steampunks, imagining technology to liberate, not to enslave. Technological tools could be labor organizers’ secret weapons, shifting power back towards workers.

-Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk

They turned the cottage into a factory.

This ethic of technophilia, labor autonomy, solidarity and loose coordination was beautifully summed up in the motto for Magpie Killjoy’s wonderful Steampunk Magazine:

Love the machine, hate the factory.

-Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk

They turned the cottage into a factory.

If sf asks, “what if the machine had a different social arrangement?” then steampunk asks, “what would it be like if we could have the productive benefits of machines without their regimentation?”

A craft worker enjoys enormous autonomy. If they get a cramp or need a bathroom break, they can just stop. If they’re hungry, they can eat. If the landscape outside the window is looking especially picturesque, they can stop and contemplate it, or even step out into the fresh air to enjoy it.

Even the most labor-friendly, cooperatively owned assembly line can’t function if its workers do their own thing. The price of factory efficiency is autonomy: a worker in a multi-stage process has other workers upstream and downstream depending on them to maintain the pace and regimentation of the line.

Steampunk is fantasy in that it imagines lone craftspeople working with all the autonomy of the individual mad scientist inventor or tinkerer, but producing goods characteristic of the factories where workers had to check their autonomy at the door.

That’s a utopian vision, one that was especially enticing in the 2000s, when internet collaboration tools allowed thousands of strangers to engage in large, collective endeavors, like writing an encylopedia or an operating system, without any bosses, working at their own pace, relying on version control systems and wiki pages to coordinate their labor while they worked their tools in their crafters’ cottages all over the world.

-Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk

They turned the cottage into a factory.

The factory owners who built their “dark, Satanic mills” weren’t interested in making life easier for textile workers by automating their labor. They wanted to make workers’ lives harder.

Textile machines were valued because they were easier to operate than the hand-looms that preceded them, and that meant that workers who wanted a fair wage for a fair day’s work could be fired and replaced with new workers, without the logistical hassle of the multi-year apprenticeship demanded by the hand-loom and its brethren.

As Brian Merchant documents in Blood in the Machine, his stunning, forthcoming history of the Luddites, the factory owners of the industrial revolution wanted machines so simple that children could work them, because that would let them pick over England’s orphanages, tricking young kids to come work in their factories for ten and twelve hour days.

These children were indentured for a period of ten years, starved and mercilessly beaten when they missed quota. The machines routinely maimed or killed them. One of these children, Robert Blincoe, survived to write a bestselling memoir detailing the horrifying life of the factory owners’ child slaves, inspiring Dickens to write Oliver Twist.

-Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk

[mitchipedia]

Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs

Algorithms and Worker Power.

Turning boss ware into workerware: Workers need to seize control of the algorithms that employers use to control them. By Cory Doctorow