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...
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 …
What if we tell a different history 2
Numerous science-fiction scenarios imagine the moment when robots turn against humans. But perhaps the more unsettling possibility is one in which the machine never turns against humans at all.
It simply needs them – us.
Not as masters, not as companions, not even necessarily as workers—but as resources.
Trees as timber. Wheat as crop. Mules as carriers. Perhaps humans, too, could become something that a sufficiently autonomous system learns to cultivate, extract, organise, or consume. There would be no hatred in this. No rebellion. No intention to destroy humanity.
Only a logic of necessity.
And perhaps this is where the old distinction between subject and resource begins to dissolve. What happens when we cease to be the ones who use the world and become something the world uses?
The machine would not have to decide that humans are its enemy. It would only have to discover what humans are good for.
of our Imagination
