Pluralistic: AI's productivity theater (25 Jul 2024)


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Pluralistic: AI is a WMD (09 May 2024)


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Pluralistic: Cigna's nopeinator (29 Apr 2024)


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Pluralistic: "Humans in the loop" must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed (23 Apr 2024)


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Pluralistic: Worker misclassification is a competition issue (02 Feb 2024)


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Pluralistic: The REAL AI automation threat to workers (11 Jan 2024)


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Pluralistic: Brian Merchant's "Blood In the Machine" (26 Sep 2023)


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Automation is Magic

The Messy Business of Security Economics.

Real Genius/Delphi III Productions

There is no such thing as security.

I’m not being a realist here (“there are no sure bets”) nor is this mere nihilism (“you will never be safe!”).

There is no such thing as security in the abstract.You cannot be generically secure — you can only be secure from something. A sprinkler system increases your security from fires, but not burglars. Not only that, but a sprinkler system reduces your security from water-damage.

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Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs

Algorithms and worker power

A horse-headed “reverse-centaur” whose eye has been replaced by the glowing eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. They are wearing a hi-viz vest and posed in shelving-aisles of an industrial warehouse.
Cryteria, CC BY, modified

In AI circles, a “centaur” describes a certain kind of machine/human collaboration, in which “decision-support” systems (which the field loves to call “AI”s) are paired with human beings for results that draw upon the strengths of each, such as when a human chess master and a chess-playing computer program collaborate to smash their competition.

In labor circles, “chickenization” refers to exploitative working arrangements that resemble the plight of the American poultry farmer. The U.S. poultry industry has been taken over by three monopolistic packers, who have divided the nation up into exclusive territories, so that each chicken farmer has only one buyer for their birds.

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Pluralistic: 02 Jun 2021


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