(1) AI AND ‘REVERSE CENTAURS’. Cory Doctorow tells readers of the Guardian: “AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage”.

…In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

A reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

For example, an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras that monitor the driver’s eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver’s mouth because singing is not allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they do not make quota.

The driver is in that van because the van cannot drive itself and cannot get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance.

Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur. There are lots of AI tools that are potentially very centaurlike, but my thesis is that these tools are created and funded for the express purpose of creating reverse centaurs, which none of us want to be.

But like I said, the job of a science-fiction writer is to do more than think about what the gadget does, and drill down on who the gadget does it for and who the gadget does it to. Tech bosses want us to believe that there is only one way a technology can be used. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think that it is technologically impossible to have a conversation with a friend without him listening in. Tim Cook wants you to think that it is impossible for you to have a reliable computing experience unless he gets a veto over which software you install and without him taking 30 cents out of every dollar you spend. Sundar Pichai wants you to think that it is for you to find a webpage unless he gets to spy on you from asshole to appetite…

…Take radiology: there is some evidence that AI can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss. Look, I’ve got cancer. Thankfully, it’s very treatable, but I’ve got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible.

Let’s say my hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: “Hey folks, here’s the deal. Today, you’re processing about 100 X-rays per day. From now on, we’re going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you’ve missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you’re only processing 98 X-rays per day. That’s fine, we just care about finding all those tumors.”

If that’s what they said, I’d be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: “Look, you fire nine out of 10 of your radiologists, saving $20m a year. You give us $10m a year, and you net $10m a year, and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed – and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong.

“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.

This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can’t do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble.

If you are someone who is worried about cancer, and you are being told that the price of making radiology too cheap to meter, is that we are going to have to rehouse America’s 32,000 radiologists, with the trade-off that no one will ever be denied radiology services again, you might say: “Well, OK, I’m sorry for those radiologists, and I fully support getting them job training or UBI or whatever. But the point of radiology is to fight cancer, not to pay radiologists, so I know what side I’m on.”

AI hucksters and their customers in the C-suites want the public on their side. They want to forge a class alliance between AI deployers and the people who enjoy the fruits of the reverse centaurs’ labor. They want us to think of ourselves as enemies to the workers.

Now, some people will be on the workers’ side because of politics or aesthetics. But if you want to win over all the people who benefit from your labor, you need to understand and stress how the products of the AI will be substandard. That they are going to get charged more for worse things. That they have a shared material interest with you….

(2) THE RESISTANCE. Jon DeCles was inspired by Paul Weimer’s review of This Is How You Lose the Time War to write this flash story in comments.

It was with some consternation that Mike faced the end of his beloved online fanzine, File Numbers, as the use of Alienated Imbecility taxed the ecosystem beyond its limits.

Atlanta had fallen first, as the mighty machines chugged away answering questions about baseball scores in 1923 and the water supply ran out. Desperate Atlanteans fled the ruins of the city for the possible salvation of a simpler life in the country and a return to pre-digital technology. Los Angeles was next to go when the entertainment industry was forced to return to live theater and lemonade made with in the theater, along with corn popped over fires made from burning cyberpads.

Finally, in a move of great desperation, Mike decided to beat them by joining them. He didn’t have a mimeograph, and they had not made sulfide paper in many years. But there was a booming industry in making paper from bamboo, which could grow sixty feet in only two weeks. And the Dictatorship had not succeeded in totally destroying the Post Office.

Mike thought back to the beauty of cursive writing, which he had learned in his early youth, when the schools still taught such things instead of Consumer Obedience: and found a small, local shop that still offered such antique devices.

He bought a pen, and some ink. Perhaps one still could change history…

(3) ALABAMA TOWN STANDS UP. “Red State Library Faces Funding Cut Over ‘Handmaid’s Tale’” reports The Daily Beast.

An Alabama public library has lost state funding after refusing to move several books, including The Handmaid’s Tale, out of its teen section. The Republican-run Alabama Public Library Service Board voted to withhold roughly $22,000 in state funding from the Fairhope Public Library, citing the library’s failure to comply with the board’s rules requiring books deemed “sexually explicit” be relocated to the adult section. Titles flagged by the board include The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, and Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin. Fairhope Library Board Chair Randal Wright argued that parents—not the state—should decide what their children read, saying it is “not your job to make that decision.” Board member Jay Snider added that it is unrealistic to suggest teenagers have not already been exposed to the language in question. Since the dispute began in late 2024, the library has raised more than $100,000 in community donations. The Handmaid’s Tale has been a particular focus of anger from supporters of President Donald Trump, partly because the Hulu adaptation.

(4) BIO OF RANDOM HOUSE CO-FOUNDER. Gayle Feldman’s biography of publisher Bennett Cerf has been reviewed in the New York Times: “He Put Dr. Seuss, Ayn Rand and ‘Ulysses’ on Your Bookshelves” (Behind a paywall.)

Swing open the saloon doors: There’s a new “Power Broker” in town. For surely the story of the publishing behemoth Random House, told through its charismatic co-founder Bennett Cerf, is as worthy of crossing the thousand-page mark as the story of how Robert Moses bulldozed New York. Books are just as much part of the city’s infrastructure as highways and housing developments.

And this one, “Nothing Random,” by the veteran Publishers Weekly reporter Gayle Feldman, is as delightful as it is hefty. You don’t want to stick the chronicles of the pipe-twiddling, Cheshire cat-grinning Cerf and his circle on a shelf for clout during Zoom calls, but plonk them on plates for dinner at eight.

Bonus: Doubles as booster cushion!

Cerf, an inveterate prankster and consummate promoter, would probably be tickled by the idea of this big, beautiful biography — long enough in the making that its distinguished acquiring editor died of old age — under guests’ rumps.

Yes, Random House pushed the first authorized U.S. edition of “Ulysses” through court; nabbed Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” which won the National Book Award; oversaw Gertrude Stein’s uproarious American lecture tour and William Faulkner’s shaky trip to the Nobel Prize. It was built on the classic backlist of the Modern Library, bankrolled by the best sellers of James Michener and Ayn Rand and burnished by some of the 20th century’s greatest playwrights and poets.

Cerf chafed at losing “Lolita” (a prudish deputy had threatened to quit); charmed authors (escorting Eugene O’Neill to a Yankees game right after the birth of his own second son); and took principled stands on the bonkers politics of Rand and Ezra Pound.

But he was famous himself for appearing as one of the evening-clothed panelists, “Sunday night royalty,” on the popular CBS game show “What’s My Line?,” a household name back when a man’s home was his castle and Nielsen and Gallup the imperial cavalry….

…Sometimes scratching this itch yielded an ugly rash, as when Jessica Mitford exposed one of his shadier concerns, the Famous Writers School mail-order course, in The Atlantic in 1970.

Cerf died a year later, at 73, and his star faded quickly as Random House’s habitual mergers and acquisitions — including of the higher-browed rival, Knopf — swelled to its current state of mega-conglomeration….

…Feldman thus had a biographer’s dream task: to reconstruct the life of someone who was both very important and largely forgotten, a prolific correspondent who kept copious action-oriented diaries and scrapbooks. Was Cerf a lightweight — “a dentist,” as Norman Mailer once spat — or so kinetic he could not be fixed? Was he a fool or wiser than us all at the project of living?…

(5) REALLY HELPFUL GOOGLE SEARCH TRICK. [Item by Andrew Porter.] If you type -ai at the end of a Google search it won’t show ai results.

— Learned from the New York Times article “A.I. Has Arrived in Gmail. Here’s What to Know” . (Behind a paywall.)

About two years ago, Google practically force-fed artificial intelligence to the masses when it began showing A.I.-generated responses to people’s questions at the top of search results. Now the company is taking a similar tack by adding A.I. into another ubiquitously used service, Google Mail.

Google this month began rolling out a suite of new tools relying on generative A.I., the technology driving chatbots, to help users manage their bloated inboxes and speed up the process of writing email. Some of the features are free, while others require paying a subscription.

Gmail users can now look up emails by typing a question, such as “What’s the name of the job recruiter I met last month?” Google is also testing a new type of inbox, set for release later this year, that automatically pulls together a to-do list based on tasks discussed inside emails. In addition, Google unveiled tools to streamline writing, including an automatic proofreader and response generator…

…All of this, of course, has implications for privacy. To make the new features work, Gemini, Google’s A.I. assistant, needs access to a user’s entire inbox. The company insists that while Gemini systems analyze our emails, there are protections in place so that its employees do not read them….

(6) ROALD DAHL BIO PODCAST BEGINS. “‘The Secret World Of Roald Dahl’ From iHeartPodcasts & Imagine Entertainment Will Explore Author’s Life As A British Spy” reports Deadline.

If you know your Willy Wonkas from your BFGs, iHeartPodcasts and Imagine Entertainment have the podcast documentary for you.

The pair have created The Secret World of Roald Dahl, a doc podcast series that peels back the secret spy life of the beloved children’s author, revealing “a life far stranger than fiction.”

The first episode is dropping on Monday (January 19). Created and hosted by Aaron Tracy, the story will explore how the author of ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, ‘The BFG’, ‘Matilda’ and many other classic children’s books spent a period of his life as a spy for MI6, along with his personal relationships, creative failures and other experiences that shaped him….

…“Roald Dahl played a huge role in our childhoods, but most people have no idea he lived one of the noisiest lives of his century,” said Tracy. “He was a fighter pilot, a British spy for MI6, a struggling screenwriter, the husband of an Oscar winner, a writer for The New Yorker, and an amateur neuroscientist who saved thousands of lives before he finally found his voice as a children’s author at 45. iHeart and Imagine have been dream collaborators to help reveal these hidden chapters of Dahl’s life and explore the complicated, controversial person behind the stories.”….

(7) FROM PHILOSOPHY TO FISHWRAP. “Mort Walker, Beetle Bailey, and the decline and fall of newspaper comics” in The Comics Journal.

…Newspaper comics’ decline began with size reduction during the second World War. Newsprint was rationed and recycling was encouraged. With few exceptions, former full-page Sunday strips went to half or third pages. Some newspapers, like the St. Louis, Missouri Post-Dispatch, reduced their Sunday comic-strips to fourth, fifth and sixth pages; they chopped and stacked panels and crammed as many features as one page could hold.

Daily comics, once published in five or six-column widths, halved that luxurious size as their hold on the public waned. In the first half of the 20th century, comics were a selling point of newspapers. All age groups and social classes read and enjoyed them. The acquisition of Blondie or Dick Tracy in your local paper was ballyhooed. Hefty Sunday papers were wrapped in their color comics section; its arrival made a grand thud on doorsteps. Comics made a difference. Adults read them with glee; kids laid wall-eyed on their living-room floors, pages spread open as they took in the color and imagery.

They were also disposable, like the rest of the daily paper; only oddballs saved them. Many of those people, like Walker, became professional cartoonists. Their work, influenced by the material they absorbed in their youth, kept the flame alive and added something new to the mix.

It took Peanuts a few years to win a wide audience. I find the first several years of the strip fascinating. Its bleak, sarcastic vibe must have felt shocking and unsettling in the first half of the ‘50s. Walker’s work always aimed to please the mass audience. Peanuts gave the reader pause; Beetle Bailey induced the ideal boffo laff, like Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy….

(8) ROGER ALLERS (1949-2026). Disney animation filmmaker Roger Allers died this weekend. Deadline paid tribute:

Roger Allers, the Disney Animation filmmaker known for The Lion King, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid and more, has died. He was 76.

Bossert noted that Allers got his start at Disney as part of the storyboard team on Tron (1982), also working on … The Little Mermaid (1989) before becoming head of story on Beauty and the Beast (1991)….

…Allers relocated to Los Angeles to work on the 1980 animated feature Animalympics with director Steven Lisberger, before working on Tron. He also spent time in Tokyo while working on Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1989).

Upon his 1985 return to LA, Allers got his start with Disney as a storyboard artist on films like Oliver & Company, The Little Mermaid, The Rescuers Down Under and The Prince and The Pauper, before serving as a co-director with Rob Minkoff on The Lion King (1994), earning them the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy. Allers also wrote The Lion King‘s 1998 Tony-winning Broadway adaptation.

Also during his Disney tenure, Allers worked on The Emperor’s New Groove, Lilo & Stitch and The Little Matchgirl….

(9) TODAY’S DAY.

Days of the Year says it’s “National Winnie the Pooh Day (January 18th)”.

One of the cuddliest holidays around has to be National Winnie the Pooh Day, celebrated on the birthday of author A. A. Milne who was born in 1882.

It’s one special anniversary fans just can’t bear to miss! Every year, the occasion is marked with events such as teddy bear picnics, featuring plenty of honey on the menu….

Learn Fun Facts About Winnie the Pooh

Brush up on some trivia in honor of National Winnie the Pooh Day! Check out and share a few of these fun facts for starters:

• The name Winnie came from Milne’s own teddy bear, Winnie
• The “Pooh” part was from the nickname of a swan Milne had met on holiday
• The story and adventures of Winnie the Pooh are set in the ancient Ashdown Forest of East Sussex, which was near Milne’s home
• Some of the original plush toys are on display at the New York Public Library…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 18, 1953 — Pamela Dean, 73.

By Paul Weimer: One of the legends of Minneapolis fantasy writing, Pamela Dean’s work first came to my attention in the same flush of attention that brought novels such as War for the Oaks to my attention. From my perch in New York, work by people like Bull and Dean and Brust (among others) enlightened me to the fact that the Twin Cities were a hotbed of fantasy and science fiction writing. 

I started reading her with her classic Tam Lin, which I picked up not long after the aforementioned Bull novel. (I was on a kick to read novels set in Minnesota at that point, you seem, especially by this community).  It’s an excellent adaptation and exploration of the Scottish-English story. You know the one. Young man taken by a Queen or noble of Faerie, and the titular Tam Lin must thus be rescued by the love of his life, Janet. You can see the appeal, it is an empowering fantasy that puts a woman in a forward, protagonist position. Since the original reels and songs, it’s been adapted many times by many authors. Dean’s version has the story take place, predictably, of course, in Minnesota, setting it at Blackrock College. 

But it is the Secret Country trilogy that I think of as her best work, or at any rate my favorite. It’s a conceit that was not new to her, as far as I am aware, it dates back to Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame series. The idea that a group of people, playing a game with and imagining a fantasy world, find themselves transported into the realm of the very game that they thought was fiction. The idea is the same, but the Secret country is on the brink of war, there’s a dragon afoot, and so there is far more urgency and threat to the realm than wandering about as in Rosenberg’s series. It is one of the classic portal fantasies into a realm you think you already know. 

I’ve gotten to meet Pamela Dean many times at local cons. She might even be able to pick me out of a line up. Happy birthday, Pamela!

(11) COMICS SECTION.

• Alley Oop has an AI problem in BCE.
• Bizarro is there for historic pie fights. 
• Brewster Rockit peeks at search histories. 
• Cul de Sac finds different benefits from knowing comic history. 
• Foxtrot reenacts a theory with snowballs. 
• Non Sequitur applies a scientific method. 
• Off the Mark tells the problem to his book club. 

(12) LET’S FACE IT. [Item by Steven French.] From this week’s “The Week in Geek” in the Guardian: “The arrival of Two-Face in the new Batman sequel bodes well for a doom-laden moral epic”.

The arrival in Gotham City of Harvey Dent, AKA Two-Face, is rarely without consequence in Batman sagas. Tommy Lee Jones’ shrieking, neon-splashed Batman Forever iteration turned the character into a dissociative identity slot machine, endlessly pulling its own lever, while Billy Dee Williams’ take in 1989’s Batman was a promise of future ruin. In Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the downfall of Aaron Eckhart’s crusading district attorney signalled the dangers of placing too much faith in the moral resilience of a single individual, especially in a city where the very idea of justice is already under existential strain.

With the news this week cautiously announced in the Hollywood Reporter that Sebastian Stan will be playing Dent in Matt Reeves’ highly anticipated forthcoming sequel to The Batman, it’s quite possible the new episode will be less interested in the masked theatrics of the 20th-century big screen caped crusader, and more in the idea that the very concept of justice is about to slowly disintegrate….

(13) THE BALLAD OF RODGER YOUNG. [Item by Dann.] I came across this from The Heinlein Society and thought it might be of interest.  “On January 17, 1944, (82 years ago today)…”

On January 17, 1944,(82 years ago today) Pvt. Rodger Young was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions on July 31, 1943, New Georgia in the Solomon Islands….

Johnny Rico serves aboard the Rodger Young in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.  The call for troopers and sailors to board the ship is “The Ballad of Rodger Young”.  The call for deployed troopers to leave the combat zone was the same song.

There are a few versions on YouTube.  The full ballad is long, so most of the sung versions are at least a little abridged. Jim Reeves – The Ballad Of Roger Young.

The most prominent photo of Rodger Young has him wearing Sergeant’s stripes.  A week before the combat action for which he would be posthumously be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, Sgt. Young realized that his hearing had gotten so bad that he couldn’t really hear.  Rather than lead a squad in that condition, he requested demotion and that he stay with his squad.

A week after that, he found himself wounded and in a position to approach and assault a Japanese pillbox that held a machine gun team that had his unit pinned down.  He crawled forward and tossed a series of grenades into the pillbox.  His action allowed his unit to retreat and reform.  It also cost him his life.

(14) PLANETARY COLLISION. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Reported in Nature, a paper that appeared  in Science before Christmas.

Astronomers have seen the aftermath of two planetary pile-ups in the same turbulent star system — providing potential insights into how planets form.

Observations from the early 2000s indicated that Fomalhaut, a star 7.7 parsecs (25 light years) from Earth, was orbited by an object that looked like a dusty planet. But subsequent observations revealed that the bright spot was fading, suggesting that it was a dispersing dust cloud.

Paul Kalas at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have used the Hubble Space Telescope to make further observations of the Fomalhaut system. They found that the original object had almost disappeared — and that a second cloud of reflective dust had formed elsewhere.

The most likely explanation, say the authors, is that both the original and most-recent observations show the fallout of collisions between rocky bodies called planetesimals, which are often thought of as the building blocks of planets. This is the first time these impacts have been observed directly in another solar system. Studying other planetesimal smashes could help researchers to understand the dynamics of planet formation.

(15) ARTEMIS 2 MOVES AND GROOVES. If you have 10 hours you can watch complete coverage of the “NASA Artemis 2 Rollout LIVE!”. But if you’re pressed for time, then WESH-TV has the solution: “TIME-LAPSE: Artemis II rolls out to launch pad”.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Heated Wizardry” from Saturday Night Live. By substituting quidditch for hockey, “A trailer introduces a Harry Potter television series with a heated twist.”

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Dann, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mark Roth-Whitworth for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]