Yeah I just feel like the example given doesn’t line up that well. There’s no difference between his good example and bad example other than having a human perform quality control, that doesn’t make it a reverse centaur situation.
The example given is more like… unsupervised horses on typewriters. The A.I. owns the process from start to end, and the human just clicks “upload” and trusts that the horse wrote a good article about books that it cannot comprehend in the first place. You can’t trust the A.I. to do a good job unsupervised, at least not yet.
A better example of reversed centaur is a lot trickier to define… it’s about an inversion of control. The A.I. making the executive and high level decisions, while the human does the grunt work like a meat puppet. We don’t have a lot of that to work with (yet). But with the same book article example, I can imagine something like:
The human asks the A.I. what kind of article to write, and also asks the A.I. to do all the research. The human manually writes a bad stupid article based on fake data. Maybe the A.I. also puts in something that gets the human in trouble like unknowingly recommending some hentai in the romance section. The human is doing the grunt work, while the A.I. steers them towards a cliff face.
I think the example holds up fine actually. The difference is that in the second example the company decided that AI should be used here, and never consulted the worker about the process. That’s the key part in the whole thing, and this sort of thing has been happening long before AI I might add. Business people decide on some arbitrary timeline they pull out of their ass, and then it gets handed down to the workers who’ve never been consulted about the feasibility, then when the timeline can’t be met or the quality is shoddy, it is the workers who are blamed.
The AI itself is incidental to a more general problem that the worker is put in a situation where it’s basically impossible for them to do a good job with the time and resources available. What makes this case a reverse centaur is that AI is the driving force, and the human is expected to clean up after it, but without even having the proper resources to do so. The whole reason the human was in the loop in the first place was precisely because everybody knew you can’t trust AI, so there needed to be somebody to blame in the loop.
Yeah I just feel like the example given doesn’t line up that well. There’s no difference between his good example and bad example other than having a human perform quality control, that doesn’t make it a reverse centaur situation.
The example given is more like… unsupervised horses on typewriters. The A.I. owns the process from start to end, and the human just clicks “upload” and trusts that the horse wrote a good article about books that it cannot comprehend in the first place. You can’t trust the A.I. to do a good job unsupervised, at least not yet.
A better example of reversed centaur is a lot trickier to define… it’s about an inversion of control. The A.I. making the executive and high level decisions, while the human does the grunt work like a meat puppet. We don’t have a lot of that to work with (yet). But with the same book article example, I can imagine something like:
The human asks the A.I. what kind of article to write, and also asks the A.I. to do all the research. The human manually writes a bad stupid article based on fake data. Maybe the A.I. also puts in something that gets the human in trouble like unknowingly recommending some hentai in the romance section. The human is doing the grunt work, while the A.I. steers them towards a cliff face.
I think the example holds up fine actually. The difference is that in the second example the company decided that AI should be used here, and never consulted the worker about the process. That’s the key part in the whole thing, and this sort of thing has been happening long before AI I might add. Business people decide on some arbitrary timeline they pull out of their ass, and then it gets handed down to the workers who’ve never been consulted about the feasibility, then when the timeline can’t be met or the quality is shoddy, it is the workers who are blamed.
The AI itself is incidental to a more general problem that the worker is put in a situation where it’s basically impossible for them to do a good job with the time and resources available. What makes this case a reverse centaur is that AI is the driving force, and the human is expected to clean up after it, but without even having the proper resources to do so. The whole reason the human was in the loop in the first place was precisely because everybody knew you can’t trust AI, so there needed to be somebody to blame in the loop.