Start with what a reverse centaur is. In automation theory, a "centaur" is a person who is assisted by a machine. You're a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete. Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI. And obviously, 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. Like 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 isn't allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they don't make quota. The driver is in that van because the van can't drive itself and can't 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. But the driver is human, so the van doesn't just use the driver. The van uses the driver up.
Cory Doctorow, The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI, 2025 # 28
The day machines took over the drivers seat...
Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
Collections that include this source
Keep exploring
- Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means r …
Entangled matters
This quote has been selected as part of one of the thematic collections of Alterlibrary, titled Entangled Matters.
In this collection, we gather inspirations that invite us to look beyond the boundaries separating nature and society, humans and non-humans, individuals and their environments. We explore how thought, knowledge and imagination emerge through networks of relationships and interdependencies — and what we might learn from thinking of societies as ecosystems.
Here you can explore the collection Entangled Matters.
of our Imagination
