AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman (Elon Musk) can convince your boss (the USA) to fire you and replace you (a federal worker) with a chatbot that can't do your job:
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:
My last nationally bestselling novel was "The Bezzle," an ice-cold revenge story of high-tech finance crime starring the forensic accountant Martin Hench.
New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in California’s pris...
My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
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I get to chat with one of my favorite writers about his new book, "Picks and Shovels", as well as what it's like to invent a word that absolutely nails the current zeitgeist with "enshittification".
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A Swiss article in which Christophe Germann argues for ending the enforcement of US intellectual property law. It's the first time I've read this perspective in a mainstream news outlet, rather than from @pluralistic watson.ch/wirtschaft/interview…
@macst derStandard also reported that the EU commission is even considering measures to invalidate US patents.
This is, however, treated as a last-resort option, that also might be very hard to realize, given that it would need an unanimous vote and Hungary is unlikely to agree.
AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman (Elon Musk) can convince your boss (the USA) to fire you and replace you (a federal worker) with a chatbot that can't do your job:
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:
If you pay attention to the hype, you'd think that all the action on "AI" (an incoherent grab-bag of only marginally related technologies) was in generating text and images. Man, is that ever wrong. The AI hype machine could put every commercial illustrator alive on the breadline and the savings wouldn't pay the kombucha budget for the million-dollar-a-year techies who oversaw Dall-E's training run. The commercial market for automated email summaries is likewise infinitesimal.
The fact that CEOs overestimate the size of this market is easy to understand, since "CEO" is the most laptop job of all laptop jobs. Having a chatbot summarize the boss's email is the 2025 equivalent of the 2000s gag about the boss whose secretary printed out the boss's email and put it in his in-tray so he could go over it with a red pen and then dictate his reply.
The smart AI money is long on "decision support," whereby a statistical inference engine suggests to a human being what decision they should make. There's bots that are supposed to diagnose tumors, bots that are supposed to make neutral bail and parole decisions, bots that are supposed to evaluate student essays, resumes and loan applications.
The narrative around these bots is that they are there to help humans.
In this story, the hospital buys a radiology bot that offers a second opinion to the human radiologist. If they disagree, the human radiologist takes another look. In this tale, AI is a way for hospitals to make fewer mistakes by spending more money. An AI assisted radiologist is *less* productive (because they re-run some x-rays to resolve disagreements with the bot) but *more* accurate.
In automation theory jargon, this radiologist is a "centaur" - a human head grafted onto the tireless, ever-vigilant body of a robot
Of course, no one who invests in an AI company expects this to happen. Instead, they want *reverse-centaurs*: a human who acts as an assistant to a robot. The *real* pitch to hospital is, "Fire all but one of your radiologists and then put that poor bastard to work reviewing the judgments our robot makes at machine scale."
No one seriously thinks that the reverse-centaur radiologist will be able to maintain perfect vigilance over long shifts of supervising automated process that rarely go wrong, but when they do, the error *must* be caught:
As debates about the policy and ethical implications of AI systems grow, it will be increasingly important to accurately locate who is responsible when agency is distributed in a system and control over an action is mediated through time and space.
This is bad enough when we're talking about radiology, but it's even worse in government contexts, where the bots are deciding who gets Medicare, who gets food stamps, who gets VA benefits, who gets a visa, who gets indicted, who gets bail, and who gets parole.
That's because statistical inference is intrinsically *conservative*: an AI predicts the future by looking at its data about the past, and when that prediction is also an automated decision, fed to a Chaplainesque reverse-centaur trying to keep pace with a torrent of machine judgments, the prediction becomes a directive, and thus a self-fulfilling prophecy:
AIs want the future to be like the past, and AIs make the future like the past. If the training data is full of human bias, then the predictions will also be full of human bias, and then the outcomes will be full of human bias, and when those outcomes are copraphagically fed back into the training data, you get new, highly concentrated human/machine bias:
By firing skilled human workers and replacing them with spicy autocomplete, Musk is assuming his final form as both the kind of boss who can be conned into replacing you with a defective chatbot *and* as the fast-talking sales rep who cons your boss. Musk is transforming key government functions into high-speed error-generating machines whose human minders are only the payroll to take the fall for the coming tsunami of robot fuckups.
This is the equivalent to filling the American government's walls with asbestos, turning agencies into hazmat zones that we can't touch without causing thousands to sicken and die:
Employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have entered the U.S. Institute of Peace despite protests from the nonprofit that it is not part…
The empress, like many other rulers at the time, legitimized her reign through Buddhism, portraying herself either as a Buddha or as a patron of Buddhists.
#WritersCoffeeClub March 18. Happy Awkward Moments Day! What’s the most awkward moment you’ve ever written?
Possibly the woman who received a blessing that she would "would succeed all day at the first thing she attempted in the morning" - and then went to the lavatory.
You can read the entire account of the incident here:
Grönland kämpft seit Jahrzehnten um Unabhängigkeit. Inmitten des Regierungswechsels auf der größten Insel der Welt steigern die USA und Dänemark ihren Besitzanspruch. 11KM über die Frage, inwiefern Grönland das für sich nutzen kann.
Grönland hat sich für einen politischen Kurswechsel entschieden. Gewonnen hat überraschend Jens-Frederik Nielsens Demokraatit; eine Partei, die wirtschaftliche Beziehungen zu den USA befürwortet. Doch Trump will Grönland besitzen.
outgoing officials warn that Trump Corp is repurposing a $42.5 billion broadband grant program to shift money away from local rural ISPs to Elon Musk's congested, expensive, ozone-layer depleting satellite broadband service you know, because he hates subsidies so much
1. Andrew Cuomo, a frontrunner for NY Mayor, has tapped an ex-employee of "the Coalition to Protect Kids," an anti-trans org, to serve as his treasurer. His campaign would not commit to EITM that it would protect gender affirming care. The latest from S. Baum. Subscribe to support our journalism.
Hey, while we're talking about Mark Rober and his gentle, subversive, kid-friendly pushback on racism and prejudice, reminder of how he framed the tech scene in Rwanda and what Zipline is doing there.
I love the subtle pushback against racism and stereotyping that happens in Mark Rober videos. I wish more SF tech people were a little more like him. ♥️👍🏿
Plus, this Zipline drone delivery is pretty cool.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.
Catch me in SAN DIEGO on Mar 24:
mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow
And in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2:
exileinbookville.com/events/44…
More tour dates here:
martinhench.com
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Authors on Tap: Cory Doctorow and Peter Sagal
exileinbookville.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
AI can't do your job: But an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can't do your job.
mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11418219…
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Cory Doctorow
2025-03-18 07:14:42
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Hey look at this
* All Games Are Political jacobin.com/2025/03/board-game…
* Coding and Billing for Transgender Care While Protecting Patient Confidentiality chipsblog.pcc.com/coding-and-b…
* Consumer Guarantees (Right to Repair) Amendment Bill parliament.nz/en/pb/sc/make-a-…
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Coding and Billing for Transgender Care While Protecting Patient Confidentiality
Chip Hart (Chip's Blog)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
#20yrsago NYT publishes anonymous remarks slamming anonymity wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archive…
#15yrsago Peter Watts found guilty rifters.com/crawl/?p=1186
#15yrsago New ACTA leak: It’s a screwjob for the world’s poor countries web.archive.org/web/2010032007…
#10yrsago Brute-force iPhone password guesser can bypass Apple’s 10-guess lockout youtube.com/watch?v=meEyYFlSah…
#10yrsago Terry Pratchett’s advice to booksellers web.archive.org/web/2015031920…
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Bruteforcing the iOS Screenlock
YouTubeCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
#5yrsago Magic in the time of coronavirus pluralistic.net/2020/03/19/gb-…
#5yrsago Fox News is a suicide cult pluralistic.net/2020/03/19/gb-…
#5yrsago How to structure a fair covid bailout pluralistic.net/2020/03/19/gb-…
#5yrsago Data is the New Toxic Waste pluralistic.net/2020/03/19/gb-…
#5yrsago Africa's Facebook modders are world leaders pluralistic.net/2020/03/19/gb-…
#5yrsago Canada Reads documentary on Radicalized pluralistic.net/2020/03/19/gb-…
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Pluralistic: 19 Mar 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
#5yrsago The worst Democrat in Congress just lost his job pluralistic.net/2020/03/19/gb-…
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Pluralistic: 19 Mar 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Yesterday's threads: David Enrich's "Murder the Truth"; and more!
mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11417702…
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Cory Doctorow
2025-03-17 09:20:03
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
My last nationally bestselling novel was "The Bezzle," an ice-cold revenge story of high-tech finance crime starring the forensic accountant Martin Hench.
us.macmillan.com/books/9781250…
Signed copies from Chevalier's Books:
chevaliersbooks.com/product-pa…
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My latest nonfiction book is "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" from Verso Books:
seizethemeansofcomputation.org
Signed copies available from Book Soup:
booksoup.com/book/978180429124…
Both are national bestsellers!
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Book details - Macmillan Publishers
MacmillanCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
craphound.com/shop/
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Shop | Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
craphound.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Upcoming appearances:
* Europa Park: Cloudfest, Mar 18
cloudfest.link/
* Virtual: Picks and Shovels at Imagine! Belfast, Mar 24
eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctor…
* #Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
exileinbookville.com/events/44…
* #Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
techshow.com/
* #Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
morgensternbooks.com/event/202…
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cloudfest_official
cloudfest_officialCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Upcoming appearances (cont'd):
* #Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
whitewhalebookstore.com/events…
* #Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/
* #PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portl…
* #PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
stores.barnesandnoble.com/even…
* #NewOrleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
contraflowscifi.org/
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White Whale Bookstore
whitewhalebookstore.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Recent appearances:
* The internet that could have been was ruined by billionaires (Real News Network)
therealnews.com/the-internet-t…
* Organized Money
audio.buzzsprout.com/6f5ly01qc…
* Did Nothing Wrong
didnothingwrongpod.com/p/episo…
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Episode 168 - Cory Doctorow
Griff Sombke (Did Nothing Wrong)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
You can follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!
Here's today's edition: pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asb…
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If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is ad-/tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "💊". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!
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Pluralistic: AI can’t do your job (18 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.
Catch me in SAN DIEGO on Mar 24:
mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow
And in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2:
exileinbookville.com/events/44…
More tour dates here:
martinhench.com
eof/
Authors on Tap: Cory Doctorow and Peter Sagal
exileinbookville.comJohn 🎵
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
PrettyBuildings
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •watson.ch/wirtschaft/interview…
Trump-Zölle: Diese Massnahme könnte die USA in die Knie zwingen
Alberto Silini (watson)Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Andreas Grois
in reply to PrettyBuildings • • •@macst derStandard also reported that the EU commission is even considering measures to invalidate US patents.
This is, however, treated as a last-resort option, that also might be very hard to realize, given that it would need an unanimous vote and Hungary is unlikely to agree.