AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots
“Reverse centaur” is a super clunky term, I think we should say “Minotaur” instead.
A Centaur has the head of a person and the body of a beast, a Minotaur is the opposite.
The term isn’t just about which half is human though, it’s about the dynamic flip in humans relationship with tooling.
The “tool” part of the centaur is the horse body. All of the hard to duplicate bits of a human (reasoning, processing, fine motor skills) with the strength and speed of a horse. A reverse centaur is when a complex system is designed that needs a “dumb human” to do the complex bits while the system uses humans as an appendage.
Reverse centaur may sound clunky but is a really elegant one liner for Doctorow’s thesis.
Pretty sure a superb writer like Cory chose reverse centaur for a reason - to make it clearer that a human is becoming the servant of a machine.
Minotaurs have some potential for badass imagery. Reverse Centaur sounds intentionally clunky.
AI is in the hype section of the emerging technology curve. A lot of good will come out of AI once we calm down and stop losing our damn minds.
It won’t be just cheap GPUs either. It will be things like more accurate cancer diagnoses, as Cory says near the top.
What we need is for regulation to catch up and start incentivizing the right things…that is, the things that will benefit society as a whole, not just the oligarchs.
not “our” minds. theirs.
techbros are the ones causing it to the detriment of everyone else.
Most of the hype isn’t about machine learning stuff for cancer diagnoses though. When the average C-level guy talks about AI they mean almost exclusively LLMs. Fancy autocomplete is their solution to everything, from summarizing an email to agentic OSes. And that’s just not going to happen.
That won’t happen until the brick wall is not only hit, but completely demolished. While Democrats are significantly more rational than Republicans, they are still almost as much in the oligarchs’ collective pockets. Only the Progressives give me any hope, but there aren’t nearly enough of them in Congress yet to make shit happen.
It is already happening.
The distractions is that you only see the AI companies which have been blitz scaling, dumping unlimited amounts of money into orders and plans without any revenue plans for the other side. This move only pays off if they can essentially buy the entire market and lock out any competition (and then the rent-seeking enshittification will being). The long-term prospects of these companies is shaky at best, but that doesn’t matter to the people currently dumping funding into them… they’re going to sell everything at the IPO and leave some other suckers with the bag.
Because of this, there are many many times the amount of advertising and promotional hype than is justified by the actual progress in the field.
Everyone is familiar with this. If someone says AI, do you think of ChatGPT or an LLM? That’s because you’ve been affected by this hype wave that is being intentionally propagated in order to drive valuations for AI companies who are looking to hit an IPO so all of the early investors can get out quick before the bubble bursts (It’s like a crypto rugpull, except it is using the stock market instead of a meme coin).
‘Actual’ AI. By which I mean machine learning, including neural networks, has made huge progress in a lot of fields following the discovery of the Transformer model (the T in GPT). The, very real and impressive, improvements that have been gained are not flashy, they do not make for immediate next-quarter profits and are mostly public discoveries coming out of academia so they benefit everyone which makes them worthless to the people trying to horde emerging technology in order to push this bubble/rugpull.
Your life will be WAY more affected by the slow and incremental work being done in the field of robotics than having a slightly more personable chatbot. Your life or the lives of people you love will be saved by the advances in protein folding which allow rapid development of new treatments which can be customized to the individual. Cancer therapies that are optimized for the exact mutations in the patient’s cancer cells or customized medicine aimed at reducing side effects or harmful interactions.
Wow. I feel like I just entered a Time Machine back to the 90s and 00s. I didn’t realize Corey Doctorow was still writing blog stuff on other venues.
He’s been writing a lot lately … ever since enshittification hit the fans
His blog: https://pluralistic.net/
Back in them boingboing days.
I miss boibgboing. Never been able to get into it since they paywalled commenting.
Not to mention all the adverts after all the stories … including anti-capitalism stories
The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free!
Since the beginning of human history …
I’ll salvage me a cheap PC upgrade once this stupid ship finally sinks.
Possibly, but components from AI centers cannot be reused easily (or at all) for consumer machines.
Hopefully we have ways to recycle the old chips. Some of the GPU chips could maybe be put on consumer boards? I’ve already heard of memory chips being recycled, except HBM of course.
Of course a lot of these companies would probably just prefer to put them in a trash compactor lol.
Haven’t read the article yet but hopefully it’s cheap used drives
Why do people keep listening to this guy?
Because he knows his shit.
Sure but nobody important cares and he’s just repeating himself ad nauseum.
nobody important cares
And you’re sure of that because …
In most fairy tales, it takes more than one blow to kill the dragon…
This man has really built a career and following off saying common sense things…
I don’t know why people keep eating it up or acting like he’s a genius, but at least this time he isn’t coining a new term to “explain” something that leads to everyone using it but not understanding what’s actually happening.
What you might think is “common sense” may not be for others. There is value in this being documented, otherwise the person without “common sense” may be influenced by someone with an agenda who does document their thoughts.
Same as when people make fun of “obvious” research, there is value in having it peer reviewed as a reference for future researchers.
There is value in this being documented, otherwise the person without “common sense” may be influenced by someone with an agenda who does document their thoughts.
Oh yeah, because no one has “documented” that AI is bullshit yet…
Only the brave Cory Doctrow could gather and disseminate this to the masses!
/s
The fuck’s with your beef? This is just one article he wrote. The guys written hundreds of pieces, maybe thousands, about all sorts of technology related issues
He’s a good writer and leader on the technology front. He gets a bit repetitive but that’s because he is trying to get the word out.
He’s actually built a career on being an author…
I’m also assuming you only read the headline
Timing. Saying common sense stuff before others gives you an edge and being the first to say it with any eloquence, in a way people want to listen and are accepting of what’s being said. A lot of what Cory Doctorow says can be hard to hear or hard to deliver without sounding condescending like NDT. His talent is in the delivery.
He also has a ton of experience in this space, he’s worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for almost 25 years. On top of that, he’s whip-smart and enjoyable to read or listen to
Saying common sense stuff before others
Yeah bro…
No one else has pointed out AI will fail before 1/18/26…
Only the great Cory Doctrow could identify something that no other human has ever even contemplated.
I heard next, he’s going to release a blog post that Nazis might not be nice people
Again, did you even read the oped
