Ed Zitron's a fantastic journalist, capable of turning a close read of AI companies' balance-sheets into an incandescent, exquisitely informed, eye-wateringly profane rant:
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Machines work faster and longer than humans, and the faster and harder a human can be made to work, the closer the firm can come to the ideal of paying zero for its inputs.
A reverse centaur works for a machine that is set to run at the absolute limit of its human peripheral's capability and endurance. A reverse centaur is expected to produce with the mechanical regularity of a machine, catching every mistake the machine makes.
37/
A reverse centaur is the machine's accountability sink and moral crumple-zone:
AI is a normal technology, just another set of automation tools that have some uses for some users. The thing that makes AI signify "go fuck yourself" isn't some intrinsic factor of large language models or transformers. It's the capitalist mode of automation, increasing quantity at the expense of quality.
38/
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A reverse centaur is the machine's accountability sink and moral crumple-zone:
AI is a normal technology, just another set of automation tools that have some uses for some users. The thing that makes AI signify "go fuck yourself" isn't some intrinsic factor of large language models or transformers. It's the capitalist mode of automation, increasing quantity at the expense of quality.
38/
Automation doesn't *have* to be a way to reduce expectations in the hopes of selling worse things for more money - but without some form of external constraint (unions, regulation, competition), that is inevitably how companies will wield *any* automation, including and especially AI.
eof/
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Normally the "digital divide" refers to *access* to technology, but as access becomes less and less of an issue, the real divide is between people who know how to defend themselves from the cruel indifference of technology designers and people who are helpless before their enshittificatory gambits.
5/
@pluralistic thus I coined the term "#TechLiteracy" (or lack thereof as "#TechIlliteracy").
- As this is a more fitting term to differenciate between "us" #TechLiterates (who know how to setup some lightweight #Linux distro and make it work (not just for us bot others) and those who believe the #Enshittification, #bloat and crap is "a fact of life" (aka. "#TechIlliterates")…
- Just like #literacy enables people to learn, interact and communicate, the same applies to using #technology and #media (see "#MediaLiteracy")…
Thus I see it as both moral and social duty to spread "Tech-Literacy" among society because decades of #illiteracy in #tech are now paying dividends and #Cyberfascists actively work on sabotaging and destroying #HumanRights and #CivilRights under #FalsePretenses lile "#YouthProtection" (see "#AgeVerification")…
- As this is a more fitting term to differenciate between "us" #TechLiterates (who know how to setup some lightweight #Linux distro and make it work (not just for us bot others) and those who believe the #Enshittification, #bloat and crap is "a fact of life" (aka. "#TechIlliterates")…
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Zitron's stunt stuck with me because it's so simple and so apt. Every tech designer should be forced to use a stock configuration Acer Aspire 1 for a minimum of three hours/day, just as every aviation CEO should be required to fly basic coach at least one out of three flights (and one of two long-haul flights).
6/
@pluralistic IMHO politicans should be forced to exclusively use #PublicTransport 2nd if not 3rd class so they get to "#TouchGrass" (or rather "#TouchBase" with their constituents).
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To that, I will add: every news executive should be forced to consume the news in a stock browser with no adblock, no accessibility plugins, no Reader View, none of the add-ons that make reading the web bearable:
But in all honesty, I fear this would not make much of a difference, because I suspect that the people who oversee the design of modern news sites *don't care about the news at all*.
7/
@pluralistic OFC they don't!
And even then they too are just as #TechIlliterate and #MediaIlliterate as their customers!
https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/116212547656181822 -
@pluralistic thus I coined the term "#TechLiteracy" (or lack thereof as "#TechIlliteracy").
- As this is a more fitting term to differenciate between "us" #TechLiterates (who know how to setup some lightweight #Linux distro and make it work (not just for us bot others) and those who believe the #Enshittification, #bloat and crap is "a fact of life" (aka. "#TechIlliterates")…
- Just like #literacy enables people to learn, interact and communicate, the same applies to using #technology and #media (see "#MediaLiteracy")…
Thus I see it as both moral and social duty to spread "Tech-Literacy" among society because decades of #illiteracy in #tech are now paying dividends and #Cyberfascists actively work on sabotaging and destroying #HumanRights and #CivilRights under #FalsePretenses lile "#YouthProtection" (see "#AgeVerification")…
First step in Tech Literacy: use a password manager. Use A Password Manager. USE A PAASWORD MANAGER.
- As this is a more fitting term to differenciate between "us" #TechLiterates (who know how to setup some lightweight #Linux distro and make it work (not just for us bot others) and those who believe the #Enshittification, #bloat and crap is "a fact of life" (aka. "#TechIlliterates")…
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First step in Tech Literacy: use a password manager. Use A Password Manager. USE A PAASWORD MANAGER.
@lemgandi @pluralistic OFC!
And then go to a @cryptoparty@mastodon.earth / @cryptoparty@chaos.social / #CryptoParty and learn the basics on how to get started with @tails_live / @tails / #Tails and @torproject / #TorBrowser and all the other things…
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Machines work faster and longer than humans, and the faster and harder a human can be made to work, the closer the firm can come to the ideal of paying zero for its inputs.
A reverse centaur works for a machine that is set to run at the absolute limit of its human peripheral's capability and endurance. A reverse centaur is expected to produce with the mechanical regularity of a machine, catching every mistake the machine makes.
37/
All that to achieve ... what?
Cheaper mass goods for a now dying out human populace that no longer want them, because the machinery that produced the goods so efficiently was alsol killing the very ecological balance that the consumer (human) species needed to be alive on.
Stupid of what?
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That's "Ed, the financial sleuth." But Ed has another persona, one we don't get nearly enough of, which I delight in: "Ed the stunt journalist." For example, in 2024, Ed bought Amazon's bestselling laptop, "a $238 Acer Aspire 1 with a four-year-old Celeron N4500 Processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128GB of slow eMMC storage" and wrote about the experience of using the internet with this popular, terrible machine:
Never Forgive Them
In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More
Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At (www.wheresyoured.at)
2/
@pluralistic "stunt journalist"
Nice! -
Even if you want to write a pastiche in the style of some writer you admire (or want to send up), word choices and sentence structure are only incidental to capturing that writer's style. To reduce "style" to "stylometry" is to commit the cardinal sin of technical analysis: namely, incinerating all the squishy qualitative aspects that can't be readily fed into a model and doing math on the resulting dubious quantitative residue:
27/
@pluralistic One my favorite writers on the epistemology of aesthetics, Graham Harman, defines style as precisely that which you *cannot* turn into a protocol of if-then rules (which would make it a parody)
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Ed Zitron's a fantastic journalist, capable of turning a close read of AI companies' balance-sheets into an incandescent, exquisitely informed, eye-wateringly profane rant:
The AI Bubble Is An Information War
Editor's Note: Apologies if you received this email twice - we had an issue with our mail server that meant it was hitting spam in many cases! Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my work, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year,
Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At (www.wheresyoured.at)
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
1/
@pluralistic Do you think Zitron's "midwit" is smarter than a dimwit? That's the way I read it. Clearly not praise, either way.
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Ed Zitron's a fantastic journalist, capable of turning a close read of AI companies' balance-sheets into an incandescent, exquisitely informed, eye-wateringly profane rant:
The AI Bubble Is An Information War
Editor's Note: Apologies if you received this email twice - we had an issue with our mail server that meant it was hitting spam in many cases! Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my work, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year,
Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At (www.wheresyoured.at)
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
1/
@pluralistic
"For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot."It's like "you get what you pay for" is being used as justification for terrible quality, instead of warning people away from suspiciously-cheap products.
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P Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary shared this topic
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@pluralistic
"For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot."It's like "you get what you pay for" is being used as justification for terrible quality, instead of warning people away from suspiciously-cheap products.
@fitzscott Oh, the products won't be cheaper. Only the quality. The savings, if there will be any - which there won't - will go to shareholders and CEO payments.
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@pluralistic
"For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot."It's like "you get what you pay for" is being used as justification for terrible quality, instead of warning people away from suspiciously-cheap products.
You get what you pay for but instead of a cheap tshirt that shrinks the first time you wash it it’s the life threatening medical advice you get from the AI chat bot that your insurance company replaced human psychologists with or the AI financial planner that advises you to bet all your retirement savings on red at the roulette table.
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@pluralistic
"For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot."It's like "you get what you pay for" is being used as justification for terrible quality, instead of warning people away from suspiciously-cheap products.
@fitzscott @pluralistic Many people won't have a choice... much like automated "call" centres, machines will be pushed into the front line, leaving people cursing into thin air when the bot 'doesn't understand ' their question...
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@pluralistic
"For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot."It's like "you get what you pay for" is being used as justification for terrible quality, instead of warning people away from suspiciously-cheap products.
@fitzscott @pluralistic Thank you. You just helped me reframe this in a useful way. I'm going to have to reconsider AI in terms of the analysis from The Innovator's Dilemma.
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Ed Zitron's a fantastic journalist, capable of turning a close read of AI companies' balance-sheets into an incandescent, exquisitely informed, eye-wateringly profane rant:
The AI Bubble Is An Information War
Editor's Note: Apologies if you received this email twice - we had an issue with our mail server that meant it was hitting spam in many cases! Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my work, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year,
Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At (www.wheresyoured.at)
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
1/
@pluralistic I LOVE ED. he says everything the media refuses too. He actually tells the truth. Wish he was known worldwide.
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@fitzscott @pluralistic Many people won't have a choice... much like automated "call" centres, machines will be pushed into the front line, leaving people cursing into thin air when the bot 'doesn't understand ' their question...
@Nigel_Lake @fitzscott @pluralistic Aren't many website forms not already like that? I mean, if interactions with a human clerk would be like many forms, the clerks would be cursed at like I curse at the jejune front end designer who came up with cute looking UI roadblocks, detours, loops, deadends and other time wasters for people who instead just need something simple done.
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@pluralistic
"For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot."It's like "you get what you pay for" is being used as justification for terrible quality, instead of warning people away from suspiciously-cheap products.
@fitzscott @pluralistic umm, no???
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A reverse centaur is the machine's accountability sink and moral crumple-zone:
AI is a normal technology, just another set of automation tools that have some uses for some users. The thing that makes AI signify "go fuck yourself" isn't some intrinsic factor of large language models or transformers. It's the capitalist mode of automation, increasing quantity at the expense of quality.
38/
@pluralistic Minor but not insignificant quibble: There *is* something wrong in the LLM/ML/AI field apart from the capitalism problem, namely the idea that intelligence is an engineering problem - e.g. manifested in trying to get from words to meaning with an algorithm, which may be literally impossible at the fundamental level & certainly isn't something we currently have a shred of evidence for. Real usefulness rests on the field's ability to move away from these assumptions.
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