Dr John Plus Dr Mary
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revdrjohn.bsky.social
Dr John Plus Dr Mary
@revdrjohn.bsky.social
2.2K followers 910 following 190 posts
PhDs in history and theology of Jihad in Islam/Xnty in Syriac and Arabic and other topic, ex-academics, historical wargame designer and retiree. Our identities concealed due to threats and doxxing.
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Reposted by Dr John Plus Dr Mary
darbyscastle.bsky.social
December 9, 2025 at 5:51 PM
Reposted by Dr John Plus Dr Mary
nkalamb.bsky.social
People who are forced to work with AI (which will have replaced their coworkers) will experience "automation blindness"--they will be required to quality-check for errors that almost never occur, which is something it is almost impossible to do. So the errors will happen and the work will be awful!
Will those products be substandard? There's every reason to think so. Earlier, I alluded to "automation blindness, "the physical impossibility of remaining vigilant for things that rarely occur. This is why TSA agents are incredibly good at spotting water bottles. Because they get a ton of practice at this, all day, every day. And why they fail to spot the guns and bombs that government red teams smuggle through checkpoints to see how well they work, because they just don't have any practice at that. Because, to a first approximation, no one deliberately brings a gun or a bomb through a TSA checkpoint. Automation blindness is the Achilles' heel of "humans in the loop."
December 9, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by Dr John Plus Dr Mary
nkalamb.bsky.social
"This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an 'accountability sink.' The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes."
The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes.
December 9, 2025 at 5:37 PM
Reposted by Dr John Plus Dr Mary
nkalamb.bsky.social
This is a perfect explanation of why 'AI' that exists is nothing like and can never be anything like the 'AI' of science fiction that the grifters want us to believe this 'AI' is.
Same goes for all that "AI Safety" nonsense, that purports to concern itself with preventing an AI from attaining sentience and turning us all into paperclips. First of all, this is facially absurd. Throwing more words and GPUs into the word-guessing program won't make it sentient. That's like saying, "Well, we keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, so it's only a matter of time until one of our mares gives birth to a locomotive." A human mind is not a word-guessing program with a lot of extra words.
December 9, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Reposted by Dr John Plus Dr Mary
nkalamb.bsky.social
'AI' is turning us into "reverse centaurs."

For instance, Amazon drivers: "The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance. But the driver is human, so the van doesn't just use the driver. The van uses the driver up."
Today's links The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI: My speech for U Washington's Neuroscience, AI and Society lecture series. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Pac Man ghost algorithms; The US wrote Spain's copyright law; Illinois makes prisoners rent their cells; "Urban Transport Without the Hot Air"; "Ministry for the Future": Canada sues Google; In defense of 230; NYPD racist murder postmortem; Student debt trap; "That makes me smart." Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. The staring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey. In the center is the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' with angry eyebrows and a black, grawlix-scrawled bar over its mouth. The poop emoji's eyes have also been replaced with the HAL eye. The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (permalink) Last night, I gave a speech for the University of Washington's "Neuroscience, AI and Society" lecture series, through the university's Computational Neuroscience Center. It was called "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI," and it's based on the manuscript for my next book, "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI," which will be out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next June: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/future-tense-neuroscience-ai-and-society-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139 The talk was sold out, but here's the text of my lecture. I'm very grateful to UW for the opportunity, and for a lovely visit to Seattle! == I'm a science fiction writer, which means that my job is to make up futuristic parables about our current techno-social arrangements to interrogate not just what a gadget does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to. What I don't do is predict the future. No one can predict the future, wh…
December 9, 2025 at 5:33 PM
Reposted by Dr John Plus Dr Mary
gilduran.com
“Próspera shuns the ‘network state’ label,” reports the FT.

But Prospera is listed as a flagship Network State project on the OFFICIAL Network State dashboard of projects currently in motion...It's funded by Andreessen, Thiel and Pronomos, Balaji's best friends and key Network State figures.
Network State dashboard listing Prospera as a project.
December 7, 2025 at 8:05 PM