Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"(locusmag.com) |
Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"(locusmag.com) |
Work vs control technologies: tech like a typewriter we use to write or a chisel to carve, versus tech that orchestrates and narrows human behavior.
Prescriptive vs holistic technologies: tech that expects the worker to confirm to the specific intended use, versus tech that expands the workers agency & possibility, enables them to do new things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Technological_...
Lovely post from Cory. I particularly liked the part about
> But his job wasn’t even to supervise the chatbot adequately (single-handedly fact-checking 10 lists of 15 items is a long, labor-intensive process). Rather, it was to take the blame for the factual inaccuracies in those lists. He was, in the phrasing of Dan Davies, "an accountability sink" (or as Madeleine Clare Elish puts it, a "moral crumple zone").
Corporations are new immortal giants striding the lands, and how their vast godlike powers are used is an absolutely earth-quaking terror, often. The diffusion of responsibility they enable, and the seeming inability or unwillingness of both the law & society to assess, to reward & penalize these giants is a great imo tragedy. We barely see, with our ant-sized view of the world.
> Thanks to a free AI model that ran on my modest laptop, in the background while I was doing other work, I was able to write [an accurate quote]
He's right, but it sure sounds like a long fight made of small actions.
> A reverse-centaur is a machine that is assisted by a human being, who is expected to work at the machine’s pace.
This exactly describes the attitude of a PM I work with who makes abundant use of ChatGPT to generate PRDs.
We get so much crap for not keeping up with the flood of requirements. "Why don't you just plug my specs into Claude Code, review it, just tell Claude what needs to be fixed?" Its exhausting.
I really do feel like a reverse-centaur. I'm genuinely expected to work at the pace of this rube goldberg bullshit machine this PM has rigged up.
But here's the thing: just as I would never try to learn physics from Star Trek, I would never take its ideas as prescriptions for how to run society. There's an episode in which Kirk almost triggers a nuclear war because he gambles that once faced with that possibility, the two sides will make peace instead. This is MAD theory on steroids.
Even the concept that there is no money in the Star Trek future is non-sensical. It is the economic equivalent of "Heisenberg compensators" or "inertial dampeners".
I feel the same way about Cory Doctorow. I enjoy reading him because he expands my mind. But I can't take him seriously.
Like Star Trek, Doctorow espouses simple themes in which there are good guys and bad guys. He envisions a utopia in which all his needs are met, and when the world falls short, he trots out the usual villains to blame, billionaires instead of Klingons. And he does it in an entertaining and clever way.
Reality is far more complicated, of course.
My father had a theory that the Industrial Revolution happened, not because of a technological change, but because the Bank of England invented fractional reserve banking. With fractional reserve lending, a bank can lend more money than it has on its books. And as long as that money is put to productive uses, the economy will grow faster than if the money supply were limited.
Instead of a central authority deciding what we should invest in, there is a distributed system that tries various things, some of which succeed and some of which fail. And with fractional reserve banking, there is more money for experiments, allowing for more shots-on-goal.
If I were to try to simplify things as Star Trek or Doctorow do, I might say that every material benefit that you have today, from electric lights to Uber, happened because someone decided to invest in an idea. In my morality tale, investors and founders are not "tech hucksters" but an essential cog in a complex, and almost miraculous machine that has made the world of 2025 almost unrecognizably better than the filthy, poor London of 1760.
I love watching Star Trek and reading Doctorow. But I find reality much more fascinating.
Any thoughts about whether reverse-centaurs are something that should continue to exist? Perhaps something about how the AI boom is going to produce miracles, as opposed to making us all babysitters forced to keep up with supersonic idiotic toddlers?
I don't think he has really articulated a meaningful distinction between the two. It seems to be approximately "it's a centaur when you want to use AI for something and a reverse centaur when the boss wants you to use AI for something".
What he seems to want is that if AI can reduce the time it takes to do something, the time saved should be used to improve quality rather than to produce more output with fewer people. Which is nice and everything, but if you want that to happen what you need is not abstract indignation that corporations are willing to produce trash as long as people are willing to consume it, it's some efficient mechanism for people to discover high-quality things in a sea of low-quality trash.
I think my (uncharitable) reading of TFA is:
1. Billionaires and tech hucksters want you to be a reverse-centaur. 2. Most people don't want to be reverse-centaurs. 3. Therefore, don't be a reverse-centaur, be a centaur instead.
As for what's going to happen with AI, I don't know. We're at point where we can no longer extrapolate the future from the past, and that's definitely scary.
But I'm an old Gen Xer, and I've lived through many of these scary moments. And I'm an optimist at heart, so I believe that, in the long arc of history, the future will be better than the past, even if I have to suffer now to make it so.
Arnold replied back, “don’t worry, you never will”.
edit: I'm not questioning how much work it was in the days of print. I think it's fairly false to paint it as if AI has much to do with the transition from high effort lists to low effort. I don't think it happened overnight that it went from 50 brains to 1, these lists have become easier to produce and far less valuable over the past few decades, I suspect the number of people involved had dwindled a lot before anyone used a chatbot to do it.
Top 10 lists are garbage nowadays because the format is used to flood search engines with Amazon Affiliate links for things like fartely brand leggings.
I don't think they went from this going through 50 brains to it going through 1 overnight because chatbots exist. They gradually got there as these lists both became easier to produce and less valuable.
The number 50 was what Doctorow presumed was the entirety of the department that could potentially have been replaced by AI, of which the making of this list had been only one of that department's overall tasks.
At 3 interns per article, having 30 interns working on 10 simultaneous articles at any given time seems like reasonable output for an online zine.
They'll suck, of course, but so do most of the books on any given "Summer Reading Guide."
He's not saying reverse-centaurs should be banned, because he knows that's both untenable (how do you define "reverse-centaur") and counter-productive (reverse-centaurs will be out of a job, but VCs and billionaires will still exist).
At best he's complaining about a system that requires people to be reverse-centaurs instead of centaurs. But he doesn't examine the properties of the system that cause that. Why can't the listicle author be a centaur like Doctorow? Why are they paid so little that they need to use AI to produce entire articles instead of just a minor citation? Maybe it's because of the power-law rewards to talent, in which the few people, like Doctorow, who attract a wide readership, end up taking all the money.
In a "fair" system, maybe all authors should be paid the same flat rate. Then authors would work for the sheer joy of writing instead of to make more money. Of course, they might have to supplement their income in other ways, but at least it's fair, right? Right? I can't imagine Doctorow could disagree with that.
Why, for example, is the listicle author a reverse-centaur instead of a centaur like Doctorow? IMHO it's because of power-law rewards to good writing. Doctorow can make a living writing a few books because his books are popular. But the listicle writer can't charge that much per page so has to resort to increasing his page output with AI.
This is not the fault of AI!
My friend is an author, and she works very hard to write her books, at least as hard as, say, Steven King. You would not be surprised to hear that she does not make the same amount of money per hour worked as Steven King.
If Doctorow wants to get rid of reverse-centaurs, maybe he should face the actual problem instead of blaming the usual suspects.
That's not what humans do when they are fact finding, though. It's not what a (proper) scientist would do if she/he discovered a great insight or theory and was wondering whether it was true.
Later, in response to various people here, I wrote a more substantive critique, which I stand by. And I stand by my original opinion: Doctorow is a talented and entertaining writer, but I can't take him seriously.