AI users who are being immiserated and precaratized by bosses who have been convinced to fire their colleagues and pile their work on the terrorized survivors of the layoffs hate the AI, because it makes their life worse in every way.
Whereas the people who choose when and how to use AI — the centaurs — are only using AI to the extent that it is useful, and throwing it away when it’s not. They may make poor choices about the AI, but those choices are theirs, they are not imposed from on high. A bicyclist who chooses to commute on two wheels can have a glorious ride, or they can ride like a maniac and end up eating dirt, but they are having a fundamentally different experience from, say, a gig delivery platform rider who has been given an impossible quota and is having their pay eroded by algorithmic wage discrimination.
I find these articles providing pithy names for AI's holes quite helpful, another was "semantic ablation." So I appreciate the overall mission here:
Every day the bubble persists, the harms of today and tomorrow increase. We need to burst that bubble as soon as possible. That’s how I came to spend the summer writing a book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux with the working title The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI, whose goal is to improve the quality of AI criticism so that it inflicts maximum damage on AI swindlers and their terrible investment bubble.
15 Comments
lmmarsano@group.lt · 21 pts · 166d
dafuq?
que?
A bit contrived?
Thanks for bringing us this extraterrestrial perspective, OP. Extraterrestrial voices matter! 🫡
ellen.kimble@piefed.social · 10 pts · 165d
Sounds like he writes with a thesaurus open
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub · 8 pts · 165d
It means you get to become the AI's fact checker and you get fired if the AI fucks up and you missed it, just because the company needs a human to blame. If you don't burn out first.
Scirocco@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 165d
Amazon just announced this is exactly what's going to happen
https://slashdot.org/story/26/03/10/212214/after-outages-amazon-to-make-senior-engineers-sign-off-on-ai-assisted-changes
TribblesBestFriend@startrek.website · 7 pts · 166d
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow?wprov=sfti1
lmmarsano@group.lt · -22 pts · 166d
And? The word enshittification is not a great contribution to society.
FaceDeer@fedia.io · 16 pts · 165d
It did convey a useful concept, until it started getting used for basically everything to mean "thing that used to be better but I don't like now."
It got enshittified.
sbv@sh.itjust.works · 10 pts · 165d
Lemmy does not like this opinion
ToastedRavioli@midwest.social · 17 pts · 165d
Maybe Im just not understanding the point of the centaur analogy, but it seems more convoluting than it does useful. At least in comparison to just making the same points without the analogy.
The point of a good analogy is to make your broader points immediately register with the reader, not create an entirely new concept to explain
melfie@lemy.lol · 3 pts · 165d
pageflight@piefed.social · 2 pts · 165d
For me, it's more that it's a vivid image. I have felt that "immiseration" so it immediately resonates; I don't need a metaphor. But when people who don't know technology are gushing about the latest agentic process, I wonder if having a somewhat grotesque, embellished counter will be useful.
sbv@sh.itjust.works · 16 pts · 166d
precaratized? Now that's a word you don't hear every day.
itsmistermoon@piefed.social · 10 pts · 165d
We in spanish speaking countries use the translated word precarización pretty abundantly in politic debate, which, in a way, it may or may not reflect the state of our socioeconomic reality.
pageflight@piefed.social · 5 pts · 166d
Hadn't heard "precaritized" either. Brings to mind some penultimate additions to pillow forts, though.
Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org · 10 pts · 165d
I agree to the goal.
Not sure how to reach it with so much noise hidden in complicated wording...
jastyty@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 165d
Why is there a modular synth in the background on the picture xD