Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (2025)(pluralistic.net) |
Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (2025)(pluralistic.net) |
Doctorow has a book-length version of this, "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI", which I just read. It's not one of his better works. It's all conventional anti-AI wisdom. Too much of it is about the impact of AI on the punditry and writing industries. I expected better from Doctorow.
I would have expected more focus on the relationship between AI and power. Doctorow has been down that road in his fiction. There's worry about government oppression, but government oppression has been around for most of recorded history, and probably peaked with East Germany. What he doesn't get into is how AI empowers corporations to be more obnoxious. Which is strange, because he's been into that in his fiction. See his "Unauthorized Bread".
One thing AI does is to make corporate control of individuals cheaper. The classic Big Brother peaked, as mentioned, with East Germany, where about 10% of the population was involved with the Stasi. Only a government that didn't have to make a profit could do that. Corporations couldn't go in for that level of surveillance because it wasn't cost-effective when it was labor-intensive. With modern surveillance technology to collect data, and AI to analyze it, it now pays. See Flock, Google, etc.
People collaborated because they had to, on top of the usual reasons for joining a military or intelligence service.
More broadly, that trick is the most effective and important today: No matter the issue, people - including on HN - will tell you how powerless they are and how pointless it is. It's such a social norm that they will actively resist and attack anyone who violates it and suggests otherwise - goodness forbid you have hope, an idea, or want to do something. I see many adopt bizarrely false perspectives and opinions for which the only sensible explanation (IMHO) is they are strong defenses against action and empowerment - many/most won't even talk about serious issues like climate change (see - I bet you're triggered by the suggestion of discussing it).
People never accomplish anything without believing in it first. It's old, basic military psyops to preach hopelessness to the enemy soldiers, in dropped pamphlets, radio broadcasts, through propaganda campaigns. Sorry, I forgot - we can't talk about those things either.
Until people believe, nothing will change. When they believe, everything will change. That's why there is so much impetus toward despair.
I'm with you here.
> When they believe, everything will change.
Taken literally, this is absurd. Belief might be necessary for change, but it's not sufficient!
> That's why there is so much impetus toward despair.
Sometimes people really are in hopeless situations. It seems cruel to blame their despair on not believing enough.
I don't read this as "if you just believe, you can do anything!", but rather "when the populace as a whole starts believing that they can fight back against an oppressive minority, they can definitely do that."
The fight for despair is surreal; at least people believe they can really be hopeless and won't let anyone stop them.
You could look at your situation, think about it as objectively as you can (ignoring, as much as possible, any media driven mind worms), pick any particular problem you face that looks solvable, and try to solve it. If none of the problems seems particularly solvable, break them into pieces and look at the resulting sub-problems in the same way. Regardless of the outcome, iterate, since it's ultimately a numbers game.
The reason this might help is that 1) you might solve some fraction of your problems, 2) to the extent that you're suffering from learned hopelessness, you'll be unlearning it, 3) regardless of either of the above, you'll be likely to learn something, as this is a very common side effect of trying to do stuff.
Hope that helps.
Great! Come up with an example!
You can install solar panels on your house, and a heat pump. This will help reduce fossil fuel energy usage.
You can self-host Mastodon and help move your friends and family members still using Xitter onto it. This will help reduce the support being given to fascist oligarchs.
You can find a local soup kitchen, or animal shelter, or library, and volunteer some of your time there. This will help provide for people and animals without other support.
Trying to do something bigger than that is going to require more people, and may require resources you don't have; I don't know your situation. You haven't really given anyone much to work with in giving you examples, and the post you're replying to a) isn't really giving "empty platitudes", and b) is talking very broadly about problems in the abstract, so there's not much guidance there as to what kind of "something you could do" you're looking for.
He evidently has no clue about open source (people just plagiarize with AI and don't do amazing things).
If he wants to build resistance as stated in the last paragraphs maybe he should be a bit more careful.
its what the crypto industry will leave behind, and you could say the main bubble already burst when ftx went bankrupt.
the defining property of public blockchains is they are designed to never go down, and the biggest ones like ethereum probably never will until its replaced by something objectively better. if you take off the scams (aka most of the industry) what youre left with is one of the missing pieces for a real fully decentralized internet.
first off, ethereum is a real alternative to iana and icann. todays open web, atproto and fediverse all depend on dns for name resolution. that system is managed by a single us based corporation thats technically controlled by a non profit but always submits to big tech demands with things like branded tlds and trademark disputes. if you replace that you get a single global authority thats fully transparent and runs on consensus instead of arbitrary decisions.
the other side is anonymous payments. the good thing crypto did in finance is not pumpfun type schemes or centralized stablecoins that run on their issuers word. its systems like railgun or tornado cash (rip) that give you the privacy of cash without risk of counterfeit money or getting set up at a sale. it doesnt matter if its illegal (and some uses of it probably should be illegal like a business doing tax evasion), just that its out there as a fallback in case digital payment systems turn against the public.
crypto is not the world saving end all technology all the scammers want you to believe it is. its way more limited in scope but what it actually gives us is one more tool to get around big tech and oppressive governments. imo thats worth all the damage it caused.
There's still a lot of work to be done before big tech and governments don't have an outsized influence, even in blockchain-mediated spaces.
My screen reader always reads them in full ("H T T P S colon slash slash..."), which is very disruptive when listening to an article, especially with 14 interruptions.
Probably at least half of the people reading this shudder at the above. But I thank the Lord my job has been never to typeset a press.
So like a political, military or religious machine does. We're already bred for it. We're Konrad Lorenz's geese, desperate to be led. It's the path of least resistance.
>We're Konrad Lorenz's geese, desperate to be led. It's the path of least resistance.
Us being that way may also be considered a result of evolution driven by the natural selection enforced by the society (similar to how we breed cattle for weight and milk production or turkey for wide breast).
> It doesn't matter what happens to Openai; Whisper is here to stay.
Yes and No. They may be here now, but they will be outdated tommorrow.
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.
Hard disagree with this. There’s plenty of AI controversy driven by the open source AI scene. The vast majority of AI art controversy, for example, seems to be between artists and guys training SD:XL LoRAs to make porn on CivitAI rather than between big frontier AI companies and artists. While CivitAI is definitely profiting off that, the controversy wouldn’t go away if the guys using data science techniques and their own hardware to train fetish porn models went to HuggingFace or their own volunteer-hosted forums instead of relying on their current distribution platforms.
tough for Cory to get one wrong, though.
Day 1, that's not going to matter much.
Day 30, it's barely going to be noticeable.
Day 365, you're going to be able to tell that you're using an outdated model—whether you're using it for general world-knowledge stuff, or for coding.
Day 1826 (ie, Year 5), they're going to still have some uses, but they'll be so out of date that they'll be actively detrimental in many areas.
>When the AI bubble bursts, there will be stellar bargains on GPUs…
>these standalone models can do amazing things
>The things these open source standalone models can do will only expand, and they will become a given for our computing applications.
I think of the “big” foundation models as the “fossil fuel” of AI. Once the bubble pops and we can’t afford to train any more of them, we’ll be distilling and remixing the ones we managed to make during this weird period where they were feasible.
This preamble is to provide context: I wear many hats, and have to be familiar and competent over a wide range of things, and I must be comfortable enough to trust that I can do things I don't know, but scared enough, that I obsess in making sure I didn't get it wrong (especially if the result is suspiciously strong).
How I spend my day has completely changed since powerful AI. While I still read papers, AI often helps me find relevant papers quickly. Interested in surveying multivariate longitudinal statistical models, AI can provide generally competent overviews to help me decide on directions.
At times, I feel like it is a better neuroscientist than I am. It definitely has a larger breadth of relevant information at its immediate disposal. I'll run ideas against it, working hard to get it to not be syncophatic (usually by telling it that a local LLM suggested it but that I was unsure), and it can often raise points that I had not considered.
At times it can even seem like it is running the show, and I'm just getting in the way: Reverse Centaur.
But other times, I feel like it is helping me leverage my time to explore MY goals much more quickly, and it is empowering.
Also, Opus and ChatGPT have a real functional fixedness issue, and a hard time weighing the importance if various aspects of the research question/space. It will get stuck in solving minutea while missing the obvious large problem with an approach. I would be lying if I said that I did not get you in telling it this. One does want to feel useful after all.
AI today feels like a partner,and it is rewarding. I have yet to find a person that I can work this closely with. Usually other scientists are too busy pursuing another paper, etc.
Once AI surpasses me, this joy will go away. I am fine with a machine being better than me in almost everything, but if it's the thing I like doing, and if it's value is only judged by the extent in which it pushes the frontiers of science, I don't want to live in that world.
Most people do jobs that they are not in love with. I forsook higher paid careers in order to have a career where I can choose what to do, then work to make it happen. So I don't want to say that my experience and fears generalize, but I want AI to stay at roughly this level. A level where we aren't the meat tool, or worse, unneeded, but we are empowered for self fulfillment.
> AI is a bubble.
> AI is a bubble. Bubbles burst. We're in for a near-total collapse of the AI investment mania
> AI is a bubble, and when bubbles burst, they sometimes leave behind a productive residue
> When the AI bubble bursts, there will be stellar bargains on GPUs
> The bad news is all the damage the bubble is doing now and all the further damage that will come from its collapse.
> 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
> Every day the bubble persists, the harms of today and tomorrow increase. We need to burst that bubble as soon as possible.
Holy. Shit. This guy is insane. He's been pulling the same schtick since 2014 calling many other companies a bubble. Why why is this guy taken seriously.
"The stock market has predicted nine out of the last five recessions." And people who don't put their money where their mouth is? The track record gets so much worse.
It seems like a stretch to call a reimplementation novel.
You can literally just sit down, right now, and do this.
But if you insist on hearing about a specific example of something I did, here's one that's appropriate. I was frustrated that all the time I spent reading/hearing/watching about other people solving their problems left me oddly dissatisfied. I realized that that was because it wasn't actually solving any of mine (except perhaps assuaging boredom a little). Thinking about it, I realized that that was because I was wasting the impetus to improve my situation on voyeurism.
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich