I missed this transcript of a 🔥🔥🔥 talk by @pluralistic when it came out in early December, it’s well worth a read
The #ReverseCentaur’s Guide to Criticizing #AI
”Over the summer I wrote a book about what I think about AI, which is really about what I think about AI criticism, and more specifically, how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: "How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm." I titled the book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish it in June, 2026.”
”Start with what a reverse centaur is. In #AutomationTheory, a "centaur" is a person who is assisted by a machine. You're a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.
And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.”
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”To pop the [AI] bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever-more-outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side.”
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington
( h/t @Sminney )
