Mastodawn

#FiduciaryDuty: “…what made this nonsensical #shareholdersupremacy standard so damned attractive to corporate leaders?

Well, what if the #ambiguity of shareholder supremacy was a feature and not a bug? What if the function of shareholder supremacy was to absolve the cruelest people for indulging their most sociopathic instincts? What if this "bright line test" was actually a universal excuse, an all-purpose #accountabilitysink that could be used to justify any cruelty or cowardice?”
@pluralistic
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/13/minority-shareholder-report/

Pluralistic: Shareholder supremacy and the precog CEO (13 Jun 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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bignose May 29

@mathowie
> Holy crap, there really is no driver!

Except that's just a lie they want you and other riders to repeat.

#Waymo of course *does* use human drivers for their vehicles. #JustAGuy

The driver is not in the car; they're in a foreign country. Working in poor conditions for unfair pay. Responsible for multiple vehicles simultaneously. Often not qualified to drive a car on your roads.

But it *is* a human driver. Who will of course be blamed if anything goes wrong, while the corporation washes their hands. #AccountabilitySink

https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymos-controlled-workers-philippines

#ArtificialStupidity

It Turns Out That When Waymos Are Stumped, They Get Intervention From Workers in the Philippines

During a Congressional hearing, Waymo's chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, was grilled over the company's reliance on overseas workers.

Futurism

StevenSavage (he/him)Mar 27

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

P2Pとかその辺のお話R | Sharing is Caring [Unofficial]Mar 2

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

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bsmall2 Jan 19

> “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

Alexander Goeres 𒀯 Dec 9, 2025

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...

Alexander Goeres 𒀯 Dec 9, 2025

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...