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Cory Doctorow

That's why TSA agents are so good at spotting harmless shampoo bottles on X-rays, even as they miss nearly every gun and bomb that a red team smuggles through their checkpoints:

pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/aut

"Lena"'s thread points out that this is as true for AI-assisted driving as it is for AI-assisted coding: "self-driving cars replace the experience of driving with the experience of being a driving instructor":

twitter.com/qntm/status/177384

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1 April at 14:48 | Open on mamot.fr
13 comments
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

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.

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1 April at 14:48 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

No wonder Cruise's murderous "self-driving" taxis replaced each low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged technical robot supervisors:

pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/rob

AI radiology programs are said to be able to spot cancerous masses that human radiologists miss.

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1 April at 14:49 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

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).

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1 April at 14:49 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

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.

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1 April at 14:49 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

An AI that "hallucinates" bad advice to fliers can't replace human customer service reps, but airlines are firing reps and replacing them with chatbots:

bbc.com/travel/article/2024022

An AI that "hallucinates" bad legal advice to New Yorkers can't replace city services, but Mayor Adams still tells New Yorkers to get their legal advice from his chatbots:

arstechnica.com/ai/2024/03/nyc

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An AI that "hallucinates" bad advice to fliers can't replace human customer service reps, but airlines are firing reps and replacing them with chatbots:

bbc.com/travel/article/2024022

An AI that "hallucinates" bad legal advice to New Yorkers can't replace city services, but Mayor Adams still tells New Yorkers to get their legal advice from his chatbots:

1 April at 14:49 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

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.

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1 April at 14:49 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

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."

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1 April at 14:49 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

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:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_T

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1 April at 14:50 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

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:

estsjournal.org/index.php/ests

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1 April at 14:50 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

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!

pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/nar

eof/
1 April at 14:50 | Open on mamot.fr
Thirteenth Worrier replied to Cory

@pluralistic
"turns the human in the loop into the crumple-zone for a robot"

Adding this to my list of perfect turns of phrase that also fucking suck.

1 April at 18:22 | Open on mstdn.social
Martin Owens :inkscape: replied to Cory

@pluralistic

"Sorry to bother you" reverse-centaur

1 April at 22:05 | Open on floss.social
Binks replied to Cory

@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.

1 April at 22:15 | Open on cosocial.ca
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