Reverse Centaurs

What sounded like a (half-)joke by Joanna Maciejewska (link) a little less than two years ago feels a bit more urgent today. Obviously, it resonated then with a lot of people, generating 3.3M views on X and hundreds of commentaries, articles and news coverage.

Now, Cory Doctorow has conceptualized it, as a kind of natural complement to Enshittification, with his upcoming book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI (link). His recent essay in the The Guardian (link) illuminates the concept of reverse centaur, the abomination Joanna was complaining about: it was mythical then, it is becoming dangerously real now.

1️⃣ "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."

2️⃣ "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."

3️⃣ "And you, the human in the loop – the reverse centaur – you have to spot this subtle, hard-to-find error, this bug that is indistinguishable from correct code. Now, maybe a senior coder could catch this, because they have been around the block a few times, and they know about this tripwire. But guess who tech bosses want to preferentially fire and replace with AI? Senior coders."

And I think that this last piece is problematic. To be clear, I don't agree with everything Cory writes in the article, but this sounds too true to be good.

How do we make sure the centaurian approach wins in the end?