Replacing human support with crappy AI chatbots, threatening to fire people unless they embrace AI, using exploited labor to train models: This all points to a worldview in which humans are sometimes necessary, always inconvenient; the least-worst option to fulfill some economic roles.
Hence, they should be replaced whenever it can be done profitably, and optimized when it can't. That's what reverse-centaurs are: inconvenient humans optimized for a task.
And fuck if that doesn't rhyme with a lot of current and historical systems of exploitation: "Scientific management", offshoring, gig work, Amazon warehouses, two-tier contracts, etc.
I don't claim that those are all equally bad, but they have something in common. They're ways to wield power in order to create one or more underclasses that can then be treated like tools.
Maybe this makes me a radical, but I feel like human rights and dignity are more important than profit. So forgive me if I don't give a shit that your agent can write code, poetry, or a recipe.
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On a recent episode of #SomeMoreNews, they talked about asking politicians what their utopia would look like... and I sure don't like the picture that is emerging of an "AI utopia"
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