> if a skilled human has to check everything it does then "AI" becomes worthless

Well, perhaps not worthless, but certainly not "a trillion-dollar revolution that will let me fire 90% of my workforce and then execute my Perfect Rich Guy Visionary Ideas without any more pesky back-talk."

That said, the "worth" is brings to the shareholders will likely be a downgrade for everybody else, both workers and consumers, because:

> 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 [...] 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.

-- https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-12-05...

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mannanj a day ago | parent [-]

The good ol Reverse-Centaur.

It's also like simultaneously a hybrid-zoan-Elephant in the room the CEOs don't want us to talk about.

	▲	Terr_ a day ago \| parent [-]
		The UPS delivery scenario is also evocative: > Like an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras, that monitor the driver’s eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver’s mouth because singing isn’t allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they don’t make quota. > The driver is in that van because the van can’t drive itself and can’t get a parcel from the curb to your porch. 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. I guess it resonates for me because it strikes at my own justification for my work automating things, as I'm not mercenary or deluded enough to enjoy the idea of putting people out of work or removing the fun parts. I want to make tools that empower individuals, like how I felt the PC of the 1990s was going to give people more autonomy and more (effective, desirable) choices... As opposed to, say, the dystopian 1984 Telescreen.