Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Measuring the cosmos, part II
Last month, I mentioned part one of how we measured the night sky, and now, part two of “Terence Tao on how we measure the cosmos”.
A network of bloggers, a reel of YouTubers and other collective nouns
While I just made up the “network of bloggers” and “reel of YouTubers,” other collective nouns for groups, like a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows, or a pod of whales, are not quite as old as they may seem, and were largely made up just a few hundred years ago, and there were a lot more than we use today, according to this video. Neat.
Who serves whom?
The narrative around these bots is that [AIs] are there to help humans. In this story, the hospital buys a radiology bot that offers a second opinion to the human radiologist. If they disagree, the human radiologist takes another look. In this tale, AI is a way for hospitals to make fewer mistakes by spending more money. An AI assisted radiologist is less productive (because they re-run some x-rays to resolve disagreements with the bot) but more accurate.
In automation theory jargon, this radiologist is a "centaur" – a human head grafted onto the tireless, ever-vigilant body of a robot
Of course, no one who invests in an AI company expects this to happen. Instead, they want reverse-centaurs: a human who acts as an assistant to a robot. The real pitch to hospital is, "Fire all but one of your radiologists and then put that poor bastard to work reviewing the judgments our robot makes at machine scale."
Pluralistic: AI can't do your job (18 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
This has always been my fear of the recent push of LLM backed AI—not that they would help me do my job better, but that I existed to help it do its job better (if I'm even there).
