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Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"

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Re: Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"

#21

Post by GMoromisato »

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.

Re: Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"

#22

Post by hn_throw_250915 »

GMoromisato wrote: post #21

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 trig…

This comment reminds me of the one time when a critic said to Arnold how he wouldn’t want to look like him.

Arnold replied back, “don’t worry, you never will”.

Re: Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"

#23

Post by smallnix »

WolfeReader wrote: post #12
smithkl42 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Here's a technology which is known to be confidently wrong pretty frequently. I'm going to use it to fact check things."

Querying an LLM for 'facts' is dangerous. Using some IR technique and incorporating LLMs to gauge relevancy and semantic alignment is a viable approach.

Re: Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"

#24

Post by cptroot »

GMoromisato wrote: post #21

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 trig…

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?

Re: Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"

#25

Post by pipo234 »

xjm wrote: post #17

> 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.

But is there really an alternative?

Re: Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"

#26

Post by pipo234 »

lupusreal wrote: post #18
WolfeReader wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Here's a technology which is known to be confidently wrong pretty frequently. I'm going to use it to fact check things."

If you have tokens to burn, using new sessions to critique the work produced in other sessions greatly improves reliability. Asking the same question multiple different ways, and to more than one LLM, also helps a lot.

That approach may be a viable heuristic but it will only get you so far. It's like flagging an opinion because it doesn't rhyme with the opinions of others.

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.

Re: Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"

#27

Post by marxism »

xjm wrote: post #17

> 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.

I really liked the definition of reverse-centaur

> 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.

Re: Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"

#28

Post by GMoromisato »

cptroot wrote: post #24
GMoromisato wrote: post #21

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 trig…

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 don't think poverty and injustice should continue to exist. But I don't think that my writing that is going to magically eliminate either.

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.

Re: Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"

#29

Post by GMoromisato »

hn_throw_250915 wrote: post #22
GMoromisato wrote: post #21

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 trig…

This comment reminds me of the one time when a critic said to Arnold how he wouldn’t want to look like him. Arnold replied back, “don’t worry, you never will”.

I love Arnold. And I readily agree that I will never be as smart or successful as Cory Doctorow. I'm comfortable just being me.

Re: Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"

#30

Post by AnthonyMouse »

furyofantares wrote: post #15
throwway120385 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, which is why I asked if it's that much work _today_. 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.

High-quality lists didn't become easier to produce; search engines were created and were unable to distinguish between high-quality lists and low-quality lists, which created a market for lemons.
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