{"id":553248,"date":"2026-07-22T01:32:19","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T01:32:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/553248\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T01:32:19","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T01:32:19","slug":"the-human-in-the-noose-on-the-special-hell-of-marking-an-ais-homework","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/553248\/","title":{"rendered":"The Human in the Noose: On the Special Hell of Marking an AI\u2019s Homework"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a (seeming) paradox: If you hang out with programmers, you probably know some senior, experienced, talented coders who are delighted with AI and can\u2019t stop talking about how they\u2019re producing the best code of their lives.<\/p>\n

At the same time, you probably also know some coders who are equally senior and equally talented who are demoralized and even terrified about how bad the AI code they\u2019re shipping is: \u201cMan, I work in avionics, and my advice to you is just don\u2019t ever fly on an airplane again. We\u2019re producing history\u2019s gnarliest tech debt at a scale never seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

How to resolve this paradox? What to make of two groups of people \u2013 both equally reliable narrators of their own experience \u2013 who are using the same tools to do the same job and having totally opposite experiences?<\/p>\n

The answer is to be found in the rich history of labor and automation conflicts, which stretches back to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. This history tells us that when automation is driven by labor, it\u2019s deployed to improve quality, as workers find ways to use new tools to make better things. By contrast, when automation is driven by capital, it is deployed to increase throughput; that is, to make more things (which are often inferior).<\/p>\n

This drive to increase throughput is a natural consequence of capital\u2019s relationship to automation: For capital, automation is an investment in a depreciating asset that starts to lose value the instant it hits the corporate balance sheet. To maximize the return on investment, capital needs to mobilize it, so when capital invests in new technology, it wants to see that tech used. It has to sweat the asset.<\/p>\n

But assets don\u2019t sweat themselves. Automation is always paired with human labor, a person who uses the new tool to produce goods and services that are ultimately offered for sale. Automation is always a system that joins humans and machines, and in that system, the human is almost always the bottleneck. After all, machines usually beat us on stamina, strength and dexterity. To sweat an asset, you have to really sweat the humans around it.<\/p>\n

This motif emerges whenever automation and labor come into conflict. Think of Charlie Chaplin caught in the machine\u2019s gears in Modern Times<\/a>, or Lucy and Ethel trying to stuff chocolate bon-bons into boxes at superhuman speed<\/a>. The humans are the bottleneck, so the machines are set to run at the absolute limit of human speed and endurance, and when the human misses a step, the insensate, remorseless machine can\u2019t slow down and let them catch up.<\/p>\n

Of centaurs and reverse centaurs<\/p>\n

This is where \u201ccentaurs\u201d and \u201creverse centaurs\u201d come in. In labor\/automation theory, a \u201ccentaur\u201d is a human assisted by a machine. The metaphor here is to the centaurs of Greek mythology, in which a reasoning human head rules over a horse\u2019s strong and inexhaustible body. A machine-human centaur sees human intellect guiding a machine. You\u2019re a centaur when you ride a bicycle (you even look like one!). You\u2019re a centaur when you use a spell-checker, too. Being a centaur is great.<\/p>\n

Maybe you\u2019ve already anticipated the circumstances of a \u201creverse centaur\u201d: when a machine directs the actions of a human. The human isn\u2019t there to provide judgment or guidance; rather, the human is conscripted to serve as a peripheral to a machine, to do the tasks it can\u2019t do for itself.<\/p>\n

Here, then, is the answer to the paradox of the AI-assisted coders. The first group, the ones who are excited about the code they\u2019re shipping using AI? They\u2019re centaurs. They are deciding how and when to use AI. That\u2019s labor-driven automation, and while workers aren\u2019t infallible, skilled workers who know how to do their jobs are the best people to decide when and how to use a new tool.<\/p>\n

The second group, the ones who are terrified about the tech debt they\u2019re generating with AI? They\u2019re not AI-assisted coders at all \u2013 they\u2019re the human assistants to an AI. They\u2019re working in shops where most of their colleagues have been fired, where they live every day in terror of losing their livelihoods, and where their jobs now consist of marking the AI\u2019s homework\u00a0at superhuman speed, for superhuman stretches. They\u2019re called \u201chumans in the loop,\u201d but what they really are is accountability sinks<\/a> and moral crumple-zones<\/a>, the designated sacrificial lambs who will be offered up when the bad code that the AI slips past them wrecks something or kills someone.<\/p>\n

The good news is, this distinction tells us how AI tools \u2013 a grab-bag of applied statistical inference tools that would be called \u201cplugins\u201d in the absence of the accompanying financial bubble<\/a> \u2013 can be used to improve workers\u2019 lives and the quality of their work. Just let workers decide how to use those tools. Create centaurs. In this regard, AI is a normal technology<\/a>: one that can be deployed in ways that make things better, or worse. Being \u201canti-AI\u201d (in the sense of being opposed to statistical inference techniques) is weird.<\/p>\n

AI is a pathological economic phenomenon<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the bad news. AI is an abnormal, pathological economic phenomenon. The sector has squandered trillions<\/a> to develop this technology, despite a few mere tens of billions<\/a> in revenue. It has lousy unit economics: Every new customer the AI industry attracts loses it money, and every time that customer uses AI, the industry loses (a lot!<\/a>) more money, and every generation of AI technology loses more money than the previous generation.<\/p>\n

Those coders who love their AI assistants? The AI companies are selling them $100 bills for a dollar apiece. When the industry tried to clean up its balance sheets (as a run-up to their IPOs) and tried charging $5 for their $100 bills, its customers loudly proclaimed <\/a>that those C-notes were not worth a fin.<\/p>\n

Anything that can\u2019t go on forever eventually stops<\/a>. The AI industry has created history\u2019s most efficient money incinerators, and investors have been providing the fuel. They can try to shift that duty to us (say, by forcing their AI companies into our retirement accounts<\/a>), but we don\u2019t have enough to keep those fires going indefinitely.<\/p>\n

The only way the AI companies can survive after they run out of speculators and suckers is to spend less on their services than they charge. Making AI cheaper is a mug\u2019s game, since every time a better new AI model emerges, everyone switches to it, which means that staying in business means committing to endless rounds of new, more expensive development<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Reverse centaurs: Used up by the machine<\/p>\n

The alternative is increasing revenues. The only way to do that is to fire workers and replace them with chatbots. That\u2019s always been AI\u2019s value proposition (for investors): We will replace trillions of dollars\u2019 worth of workers with chatbots, and those workers\u2019 former employers will split the savings with us.<\/p>\n

Which is to say: The only way AI can succeed is to create as many reverse centaurs as possible. AI that helps workers do better things won\u2019t turn trillions of dollars in losses into trillions of dollars in profits. To do that, you need to fire most workers and put the jobspocalpyse\u2019s survivors in harness as mounts for their chatbot overlords.<\/p>\n

A reverse centaur isn\u2019t just used by a machine \u2013 we are used up by it. Amazon has built the most automated warehouses in human history, and those warehouses have the highest rate of injury in the sector<\/a>. That\u2019s not a coincidence, it\u2019s a consequence. If you\u2019re going to make a nine-figure bet on automation, you\u2019re going to run those machines as fast as you can, and that cadence is limited by the speed and endurance of workers. Make someone work at the limit of their speed and endurance for hour after hour, and they will make a mistake \u2013 and end up impaled on a forklift.<\/p>\n

If the AI companies have a future (a very, very, very big if), it lies in forcing us to mark their AI\u2019s homework, and absorb the blame for its mistakes.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Cory\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCory Doctorow\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGuest columnist\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of dozens of books, including Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (nonfiction); and the novel Picks and Shovels. His newest book is The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Born in Toronto, he lives in Los Angeles and London.
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\tSee full bio\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s a (seeming) paradox: If you hang out with programmers, you probably know some senior, experienced, talented coders…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":553249,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-553248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=553248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/553249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=553248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}