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points by Amorymeltzer 3 days ago | 0 comments

>Not because any single task is harder. Because there are so many more of them, all at once.

There's a nuance here since the author says "Almost all of this is private work," but this is basically the entire premise of Cory Doctorow's excellent The Reverse Centaur's Guide To Life After AI, which everyone should read. If I may quote:

>>In automation theory (the academic study of automation), a centaur is a person who is assisted by a machine. Think of a clever human's head, arms, and hands atop a horse's strong body. Riding a bicycle or driving a car makes you a centaur; so does using the mute button on your TV remote when an ad comes on. Wearing a hearing aid makes you a centaur, and so does using a calculator to multiply large numbers. Being a centaur can be glorious.... Best of all, I get to choose exactly which of these features I use.... No one expects me to write more pages when I get a new tool.

[snip]

>>A reverse centaur is a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine. There's a classic I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel are working on an assembly line at a chocolate factory, taking bonbons off the belt and wrapping them in paper. As the belt goes taster and faster, Lucy and Ethel have to work at superhuman speed. They're reverse centaurs: the machine can move the chocolates from one place to another, but it needs a human to pack them into the box, and the humans who act as its assistant are made to work at a pace that exceeds all human capacity until calamity ensues.

"More tasks all at once" is exactly the premise of that I Love Lucy episode.

[–] juanre 2 days ago

+1 to The Reverse Centaur, but I don't think it matches what the author describes. As a VP of Technology he presumably has some latitude in choosing what to work on.

[–] vickychijwani 2 days ago

With AI you can be either a centaur or a reverse centaur - as long as you delegate only the implementation but maintain control over the direction, outcome and taste. This means only 1-2 tasks at a time.

When you begin to delegate high-level thinking to the machine, which is inevitable with “many tasks, all at once” (the alternative is burnout like the article describes), that’s when you transform into the reverse centaur.

[–] eithed 2 days ago

I'd think about it this way - with LLMs I'm still a human with one brain, one set of hands, one keyboard, one screen.

I can delegate more quickly, but still I'm constrained to what I can respond to because I can focus on limited amount of thing at a time. It's like I was given multiple sets of hands (so your centaur parable stands), but that doesn't make me faster if I need to do multiple things at the same time - have you tried juggling, chewing gum and skipping at the same time?