AI users who are being immiserated and precaratized by bosses who have been convinced to fire their colleagues and pile their work on the terrorized survivors of the layoffs hate the AI, because it makes their life worse in every way.
Whereas the people who choose when and how to use AI — the centaurs — are only using AI to the extent that it is useful, and throwing it away when it’s not. They may make poor choices about the AI, but those choices are theirs, they are not imposed from on high. A bicyclist who chooses to commute on two wheels can have a glorious ride, or they can ride like a maniac and end up eating dirt, but they are having a fundamentally different experience from, say, a gig delivery platform rider who has been given an impossible quota and is having their pay eroded by algorithmic wage discrimination.
I find these articles providing pithy names for AI’s holes quite helpful, another was “semantic ablation.” So I appreciate the overall mission here:
Every day the bubble persists, the harms of today and tomorrow increase. We need to burst that bubble as soon as possible. That’s how I came to spend the summer writing a book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux with the working title The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI, whose goal is to improve the quality of AI criticism so that it inflicts maximum damage on AI swindlers and their terrible investment bubble.
Maybe Im just not understanding the point of the centaur analogy, but it seems more convoluting than it does useful. At least in comparison to just making the same points without the analogy.
The point of a good analogy is to make your broader points immediately register with the reader, not create an entirely new concept to explain
The intention is to describe humans serving machines instead of machines serving humans. The term centaur doesn’t necessarily describe servitude and there’s probably a better term that is more apt and more readily understood.