I picked up Cory Doctorow’s book Radicalized recently at the library. Doctorow has a knack for making you care about people in dramatically different social situations. It forced me to really feel for the characters who are on the receiving end of the ugly social impacts of technology “advancements”.

Doctorow said:

Science fiction’s superpower isn’t thinking up new technologies – it’s thinking up new social arrangements for technology. What the gadget does is nowhere near as important as who the gadget does it for and who it does it to. Your car can use a cutting-edge computer vision system to alert you when you’re drifting out of your lane – or it can use that same system to narc you out to your insurer so they can raise your premiums by $10 that month to punish you for inattentive driving. Same gadget, different social arrangement.

Today I stumbled upon another piece titled Reverse Centaurs. This is a very short and poignant essay that provides a fresh perspective on why we are getting such a dramatically different experience of AI.

The key idea? Be a centaur, not a reverse centaur. A centaur is a human powered by a machine, while a reverse centaur is a machine served by a human who no longer has agency. Their job is to take the blame for the machine’s mistakes.

A centaur is a human being who is assisted by a machine that does some onerous task (like transcribing 40 hours of podcasts). A reverse-centaur is a machine that is assisted by a human being, who is expected to work at the machine’s pace. That would be Buscaglia: who was given an assignment to do the work of 50 or more people, on a short timescale, and a shoestring budget.

When you give a freelancer an assignment to turn around ten summer lists on a short timescale, everyone understands that his job isn’t to write those lists, it’s to supervise a chatbot.

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”).

When I used Whisper to transcribe a folder full of MP3s, that was me being a centaur. When Buscaglia was assigned to oversee a chatbot’s error-strewn, 64-page collection of summer lists, on a short timescale and at short pay, with him and him alone bearing the blame for any errors that slipped through, that was him being a reverse-centaur.