Last year, we featured an extensive interview with tech journalist and science fiction author Cory Doctorow about his book, Enshittification: why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. The prolific Doctorow is back with a provocative new book that serves as a follow-up of sorts, focusing on AI and related topics: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.
Doctorow doesn’t actually like to talk about AI, but he’s constantly asked to comment on it. “I made the tactical mistake of being sick of talking about AI,” Doctorow told Ars. “So I wrote a book about why I think it’s silly to keep asking people to talk about it, and now I have to talk about it.” reverse centaur is Doctorow’s attempt to “separate bullshit from material reality.”
In automation theory, according to Doctorow, a “centaur” describes a human being enhanced with a technology, such as machine learning, or even just driving a car or using autocompletion. A reverse centaur “is a machine head on a human body, a person who serves as a soft flesh appendage to an indifferent machine,” Doctorow said in a speech last December. He gave the example of an Amazon delivery driver, surrounded by artificial intelligence cameras monitoring his driving, which essentially serves as the delivery van’s peripheral.
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