Tuesday, June 6, 2023

The term of the day is "Reverse Centaur"

 From Cory Doctorow:

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.

...

By contrast, an Amazon driver is a reverse-centaur. The AI is in charge, and the human is the junior partner. The AI is the head, telling the body what to do. The driver is the body — the slow-witted, ambulatory meat that is puppeteered by the AI master.


Doctorow provides further details in this post (complete with the wonderful phrase "digital phrenology").

Amazon DSP vans have Netradyne cameras inside and out, including one that is always trained on drivers' faces, performing digital phrenology on them, scoring them based on junk-science microexpression detection and other imaginary metrics.

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