Building on "The Unaccountability Machine" I speculate that jobs - maybe no small amount of them - ARE accountability sinks. Is your job just there to protect others or diffuse responsibility? https://www.stevensavage.com/blog/2026/03/the-unaccountability-job.html

#jobs #careers #accountabilitysink #unaccountabilitymachine

The Unaccountability Job? – Steven Savage

なぜカスタマーサービスはAIチャットボットになってもクソなのか

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://p2ptk.org/ai/5433

> “Look, you fire nine out of 10 of your radiologists, saving $20m a year. You give us $10m a year... “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 is a specific kind of reverse centaur: it is what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink”. The radiologist’s job is not really to oversee the AI’s work, it is to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes.
#ReverseCentaur #DanDavies #AccountabilitySink
here in this piece @Cory Doctorow is describing the relation between human workers and ai. in particular what he calls "reverse centaurs" or other authors have named "accountability sinks".
there are lots of great insights in this article but one stood out for me: working with ai is not easy. people often think that having ai create texts for them is an innocuous thing. like OCR just more modern. but it isn't. errors made by ai can be very hard to spot. and doctorow here describes, why:

And because AI is just a word guessing program, because all it does is calculate the most probable word to go next, the errors it makes are especially subtle and hard to spot, because these bugs are literally statistically indistinguishable from working code (except that they're bugs).
[...]
And you, the human in the loop – the reverse centaur – you have to spot this subtle, hard to find error, this bug that is literally statistically indistinguishable from correct code.
as john oliver recently said: welcome to the demise of our mutually shared reality! isn't it fun?!

#computer #CoryDoctorow #JohnOliver #ReverseCentaur #AccountabilitySink #AI #KI

#^Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period. 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...
here in this piece @Cory Doctorow is describing the relation between human workers and ai. in particular what he calls "reverse centaurs" or other authors have named "accountability sinks".
there are lots of great insights in this article but one stood out for me: working with ai is not easy. people often think that having ai create texts for them is an innocuous thing. like OCR just more modern. but it isn't. errors made by ai can be very hard to spot. and doctorow here describes, why:

And because AI is just a word guessing program, because all it does is calculate the most probable word to go next, the errors it makes are especially subtle and hard to spot, because these bugs are literally statistically indistinguishable from working code (except that they're bugs).
[...]
And you, the human in the loop – the reverse centaur – you have to spot this subtle, hard to find error, this bug that is literally statistically indistinguishable from correct code.
as john oliver recently said: welcome to the demise of our mutually shared reality! isn't it fun?!

#computer #CoryDoctorow #JohnOliver #ReverseCentaur #AccountabilitySink #AI #KI

#^Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period. 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...

Via @pluralistic

'...it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur" called an "accountability sink."

And

'Automation blindness is the Achilles' heel of "humans in the loop."'

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Long but worth the read.

#ReverseCentaur #AccountabilitySink #AI

1/3

Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

ShotSpotter tech sent cops racing into NYC neighborhoods 62,000 times in 9 years after noises never confirmed as gunshots, an 83% false alarm rate.

It's stop-and-frisk dressed up as techno-fix, giving cover for over-policing Black neighborhoods. NY has spent $45 million on it.

https://bds.org/assets/files/Brooklyn-Defenders-ShotSpotter-Report.pdf

cc @pluralistic #AccountabilitySink