Making Choices
Which end of the centaur do we want to be?
There is something deeply unsettling about what is happening at the moment, in the same way dreams can be disturbing, or passing a traffic accident, which everybody has slowed down for. The sense that we cannot alter it, even as we recognise it is part of us. The dream is ours, and just as we are the traffic, we are the traffic accident.
Finding balance is a challenge. I do my best to find a counterargument to the ones I am reading, but at the moment, I find myself stuck between the fluent and compelling arguments of Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” thesis and others of the same persuasion and the messianic optimism of the AI advocates who cannot see beyond the metrics of the economy and their increasing enclosure of it. It leaves me with something akin to that sense we get as the wind increases, the clouds gather, and we see the underside of leaves: we know a storm is coming.
It is the same helplessness that accompanies watching economies hollowed out by wealth accumulation for a few being stretched beyond breaking point by politicians who are either in the pockets of those few, or who defer to them as “wealth creators” rather than as the privateers they are.
Privateers were privately owned and operated vessels authorised by a government during wartime to attack and capture enemy ships, particularly merchant vessels. Unlike pirates, privateers operated under a letter of marque—a formal government licence that made their actions legal under international law (at least in the eyes of the issuing country). They occupied a legal grey area: lawful combatants in the eyes of their own nations, but pirates in the eyes of their enemies if captured.
In the 18th Century, we had Captain Kidd and Woodes Rogers for the British and John Paul Jones and Charles Wilson Peale’s “True American” for the Americans. Today, we have the privatised utilities for the British, the Broligarchs for the Americans, and the sense that countries matter less than they used to in the face of economic warfare, when consumers’ attention is the battleground.
What bothers me more is our acceptance of the mediocrity being fed to us. The driver of it may be Doctorow’s enshittification of, well, pretty much everything in order to get greater returns on every unit of investment, but we are the other side of that. We read the drivel peddled by mass media, interact with toxic, fabricated messages on social media, and all we do is complain. We accept the myth that productivity is a function of the time we spend at work, rather than what we do whilst there, and passively accept key logging so we, rather than what we produce, can be measured.
I believe Gary Kasparov first used the term “centaur” to describe a human supported by AI. The opposite of that, the “reverse centaur,” has appeared as a meme, describing a situation where the human is in service of the AI. As Cory Doctorow describes here, this model seems to be winning. We are accepting being led down a route from being the human half of the centaur to the equivalent of the horse’s arse.
The sense of helplessness smacks of desperation, a lingering hope that somehow this is a phase.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats….the monomaniacal pursuit of success and wealth has paradoxically cheapened the lives of those engaged in it, making them unable to appreciate the simpler pleasures."
Walden. Henry Thoreau. Chapter 1 - “Economy”
It is a phase, and one that will be over - but when it is, we will not have gone back to the populist view of the recovered place in the world they love to sell (but don’t believe)
Earlier this year, I suggested that the nature of craft in an age of AI revolved around five points:
I hold to that. I think it is at the heart of stepping off the path to becoming the rear end of the pantomime centaur.
It is not easy, there is no formula, only experimentation, harnessing hope.
St. Augustine identified the two beautiful daughters of Hope as anger and courage. The anger is contained in the underlying sense of disturbance we feel.
We need to harness it, with the courage to change things for the better.
“The severest test of work today is not of our strategies but of our imaginations and identities. For a human being, finding good work and doing good work is one of the ultimate ways of making a break for freedom”
Crossing the Unknown Sea. David Whyte.