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Top-level
 That's the good kind of automation, and we all benefit from it. But it only takes a small twist to turn this good automation into a *nightmare*. I'm speaking here of the *reverse-centaur*: automation in which the computer is in charge, bossing a human around so it can get its job done. 13/ 19 comments
That's how AI-assisted coding is pitched: rather than looking up tricky syntax and other tedious programming tasks, an AI "co-pilot" is billed as freeing up its human "pilot" to focus on the creative puzzle-solving that makes coding so satisfying. 15/ But an hallucinating AI is a *terrible* co-pilot. It's just good enough to get the job done much of the time, but it also sneakily inserts booby-traps that are statistically *guaranteed* to look as plausible as the *good* code (that's what a next-word-guessing program does: guesses the statistically most likely word). 16/ This turns AI-"assisted" coders into *reverse* centaurs. The AI can churn out code at superhuman speed, and you, the human in the loop, must maintain perfect vigilance and attention as you review that code, spotting the cleverly disguised hooks for malicious code that the AI can't be prevented from inserting into its code. As "Lena" writes, "code review [is] difficult relative to writing new code": https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169 17/ Why is that? "Passively reading someone else's code just doesn't engage my brain in the same way. It's harder to do properly": https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773780355708764665 There's a name for this phenomenon: "automation blindness." Humans are just not equipped for eternal vigilance. We get good at spotting patterns that occur frequently - so good that we miss the anomalies. 18/ In other words, they turn you into a reverse-centaur. Whereas my blind-spot double-checking robot allows me to make maneuvers at human speed and points out the things I've missed, a "supervised" self-driving car makes maneuvers at a computer's frantic pace, and demands that its human supervisor tirelessly and perfectly assesses each of those maneuvers. 20/ No wonder Cruise's murderous "self-driving" taxis replaced each low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged technical robot supervisors: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no AI radiology programs are said to be able to spot cancerous masses that human radiologists miss. 21/ A centaur-based AI-assisted radiology program would keep the same number of radiologists in the field, but they would get *less* done: every time they assessed an X-ray, the AI would give them a second opinion. If the human and the AI disagreed, the human would go back and re-assess the X-ray. We'd get better radiology, at a higher price (the price of the AI software, plus the additional hours the radiologist would work). 22/ But back to making the AI bubble pay off: for AI to pay off, the human in the loop has to *reduce* the costs of the business buying an AI. No one who invests in an AI company believes that their returns will come from business customers to agree to *increase* their costs. The AI can't do your job, but the AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI anyway - that pitch is the most successful form of AI disinformation in the world. 23/ The only reason bosses want to buy robots is to fire humans and lower their costs. That's why "AI art" is such a pisser. There are plenty of harmless ways to automate art production with software - everything from a "healing brush" in Photoshop to deepfake tools that let a video-editor alter the eye-lines of all the extras in a scene to shift the focus. 25/ A graphic novelist who models a room in The Sims and then moves the camera around to get traceable geometry for different angles is a centaur - they are genuinely offloading some finicky drudgework onto a robot that is perfectly attentive and vigilant. But the pitch from "AI art" companies is "fire your graphic artists and replace them with botshit." 26/ They're pitching a world where the robots get to do all the creative stuff (badly) and humans have to work at robotic pace, with robotic vigilance, in order to catch the mistakes that the robots make at superhuman speed. Reverse centaurism is *brutal*. That's not news: Charlie Chaplin documented the problems of reverse centaurs nearly 100 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film) 27/ As ever, the problem with a gadget isn't what it does: it's who it does it *for* and who it does it *to*. There are plenty of benefits from being a centaur - lots of ways that automation can help workers. But the only path to AI profitability lies in *reverse* centaurs, automation that turns the human in the loop into the crumple-zone for a robot: https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260 28/ I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel *The Bezzle*! Catch me in Boston with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then Providence (Apr 12) and beyond! https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour eof/ @pluralistic Adding this to my list of perfect turns of phrase that also fucking suck.  @pluralistic Has anyone ever established that that was an AI chatbot? Lots of articles seem to assume it was AI; but the decision referred to an out-of-date support script - I think it was just a normal, dumb “choose your own adventure” bot interaction. |
Gregory's Server
Think of Amazon warehouse workers, who wear haptic bracelets and are continuously observed by AI cameras as autonomous shelves shuttle in front of them and demand that they pick and pack items at a pace that destroys their bodies and drives them mad:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/
Automation centaurs are great: they relieve humans of drudgework and let them focus on the creative and satisfying parts of their jobs.
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