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, 2025The day machines took over the drivers seat...
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- 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 …
What if everything is entangled
Scientific objectivity became one of the great achievements of modernity, but it also carried a dangerous forgetting: that knowledge is never entirely outside the world it seeks to know. We are embodied, situated, entangled beings. We do not merely observe the world; we participate in it.
AI may mark a new turn in this story. It promises an intelligence increasingly detached from embodiment, situatedness and experience—a form of objectivity that can process the world without having to inhabit it.
But perhaps a livable world depends precisely on the opposite: on knowing from within, on recognising relations, dependencies and limits. We breathe through plants; we eat through soils, water, animals, plants and microorganisms; we shelter in materials drawn from forests and the earth. Survival is not something accomplished by unique beings. It is continuously made possible by innumerable relations among different forms of life and matter.
Not intelligence above the world, but intelligence embedded in it, dependent on the earth's soil, plants, animals, shelter, food, oxygen, care.
And so the question becomes not only what AI can know, but what kind of world becomes possible when intelligence forgets what it means to belong to the world it knows.
Meike Gleimof our Imagination
