Reverse centaurs

Almost a year after our beer at Savoy, Gabriel and I got to meet up for lunch in Malmö today. Having grown up together in Kalmar, Gabriel has been a recurring character on the pages of Rawls & Me, with shared adventures stretching from Serbia to Sävar, but today we just got to hang out for a bit in Folkets Park.

Among the many things we covered, Gabriel brought up Cory Doctorow’s work on “reverse centaurs”: situations where machine intelligence does the directing while the human provides a cheap, disposable physical body to execute tasks, i.e. the exact opposite of what the AI revolution originally promised it would do. Like the suggestion that AI stands for “African Intelligence” (as its abilities depend on the underpaid work of millions in digital sweatshops across Africa), such concepts definitely have analytical purchase, even if their implications for the future remain ambiguous.

As much as I have spent the last 20+ years arguing for the democratic steering of technology, I am afraid that my personal response to AI embodies a certain degree of fatalism, a bit like Too-ticky in Moominland Midwinter: “All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured”.