There's some nuance in difference, but strong parallels to (the amazing) Ursala Franklin, who had two dichotomies:
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.
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.
> Thatcher told us, “There is no alternative.” In 1982, Bill Gibson refuted her thus: “The street finds its own uses for things.”
> I know which prophet I’m gonna follow.
> 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.
I love watching Star Trek. At its best, it both entertains and expands your mind. As Doctorow says, it explores the impact of technology on society and individuals, and it helps us see our current world in a different light.
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.
I'm curious. Aside from this general criticism of Doctorow, do you have any specific criticisms of TFA's contents?
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'm sorry, but is producing 10 lists of 15 items each really 50 peoples' worth of work? The amount of effort this would take today without the use of a chatbot seems overblown. Or with the use of a chatbot, but fact-checked, for that matter.
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.
In the days of print media, before you could google "top 10" X, the newspaper might well be your only source of "listicles." They took that responsibility seriously.
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.
It was 3 people who were replaced for the making of a list.
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.
That wouldn't have been their full time jobs but that list would have passed through quite a few people's hands; from gathering all the events/books/activities, picking out some that seem fun for several different 'types' of people, compiling, writing, reviewing/editing, fact checking and formatting.
I agree with Doctorow about the de-humanizing nature of this sort of work - but to your specific point about fact checking, it'd honestly be fastest to outsource that to a different LLM, maybe ChatGPT in "deep research" mode or something like that.
jauntywundrkind|5 months ago
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.
xjm|5 months ago
> 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.
marxism|5 months ago
> 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.
pipo234|5 months ago
GMoromisato|5 months ago
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.
cptroot|5 months ago
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?
hn_throw_250915|5 months ago
Arnold replied back, “don’t worry, you never will”.
Freak_NL|5 months ago
[deleted]
furyofantares|5 months ago
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.
throwway120385|5 months ago
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.
dentemple|5 months ago
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.
rtkwe|5 months ago
cxr|5 months ago
smithkl42|5 months ago
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
melon_tusk|5 months ago