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it's time (lemmy.nz)

anyone else feel that AI has sucked all joy out of the open source world?

i used to scroll fdroid when I'm bored and it was so exciting sometimes

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[-] 1995ToyotaCorolla@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

I was recently listening to a Cory Doctorow interview where he was discussing the concept of "reverse centaurs". Essentially, if a centaur is a human who uses technology to perform a task they cannot alone, a reverse centaur is the opposite. Think amazon warehouse workers. An algorithm tells the worker where to pick up the box, and where to put it down. It does all the thinking, and the human is just a pair of hands.

One path you can take is that you have skilled professionals who have a depth of knowledge in their field, and can skillfully use an AI to enhance their work. The AI can for example, proof-read human made code and look for typos, bugs, or other possible mistakes that we all as humans occasionally make. This is a centaur situation, where the human is in the driver's seat.

The other path is that corporations can have fewer skilled professionals in fields that were previously difficult to automate. AI allows you to fire 90% of those professionals and the ones that remain are essentially glorified amazon warehouse workers who do the bidding of the AI. They hit enter on the keyboard, they sign off on the code, and they most importantly fall on the sword when the AI fails. This is the reverse centaur situation

So while these jobs may be "safe" from AI, it's important that we avoid the reverse-centaur path. Though with corpos' tendency to chase profit over all else, this might be a big ask.

this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2026
531 points (97.5% liked)

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