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Cory Doctorow on the Right -- and Wrong -- Way to Criticize AI Interview with Cory Doctorow
Angela Frances Hui
I want to start off by asking about your book’s title. What is a reverse centaur, and why is it a useful concept when it comes to understanding AI?
Cory Doctorow
In automation theory, a centaur is someone who is assisted by a tool. Whenever you use a spellchecker, or ride a bicycle, you are a centaur. A reverse centaur is someone who’s recruited to assist a machine. The example everyone knows is Lucille Ball working in the chocolate factory — she and Ethel have to pluck chocolates off the assembly line and put them in the chocolate box. The owner of a machine will want to utilize the machine to its maximum throughput, because that’s how they make their money back. The human, the reverse centaur, is going to be the slowest part of the system. So, you crank up the machine to run at the very outer limit of the human being’s endurance and capability, which means that you’re not just using a person, you’re using a person up.
When you talk to people about AI, you get people who are skilled workers and historically reliable narrators of their own experience, and they tell you that using AI helps them in all kinds of ways and makes their work better. And then you meet people who, again, are skilled workers and reliable narrators of their experience, and they tell you that that very same AI tool is making them miserable, and they can’t believe how poor the quality of the work they’re producing is. My proposal here is that the answer to this conundrum is that the first group are centaurs, and the second group are reverse centaurs.
As a science fiction writer, the one thing I know to be very true is that what a machine does is way less important than who the machine does it for and who the machine does it to. That’s the dispositive question we should be trying to answer when we talk about labor and automation, whether or not we’re talking about AI.
Effective AI Criticism
Angela Frances Hui
Your book is about how to be an effective AI critic. Can you tell us more about what effective AI criticism entails and, conversely, what it means to be an ineffective AI critic?
Cory Doctorow
If you believe, as I do, that the toxic thing about AI is the bubble, then you have to attack the material basis of the bubble.
I want to start off by asking about your book’s title. What is a reverse centaur, and why is it a useful concept when it comes to understanding AI?
Cory Doctorow
In automation theory, a centaur is someone who is assisted by a tool. Whenever you use a spellchecker, or ride a bicycle, you are a centaur. A reverse centaur is someone who’s recruited to assist a machine. The example everyone knows is Lucille Ball working in the chocolate factory — she and Ethel have to pluck chocolates off the assembly line and put them in the chocolate box. The owner of a machine will want to utilize the machine to its maximum throughput, because that’s how they make their money back. The human, the reverse centaur, is going to be the slowest part of the system. So, you crank up the machine to run at the very outer limit of the human being’s endurance and capability, which means that you’re not just using a person, you’re using a person up.
When you talk to people about AI, you get people who are skilled workers and historically reliable narrators of their own experience, and they tell you that using AI helps them in all kinds of ways and makes their work better. And then you meet people who, again, are skilled workers and reliable narrators of their experience, and they tell you that that very same AI tool is making them miserable, and they can’t believe how poor the quality of the work they’re producing is. My proposal here is that the answer to this conundrum is that the first group are centaurs, and the second group are reverse centaurs.
As a science fiction writer, the one thing I know to be very true is that what a machine does is way less important than who the machine does it for and who the machine does it to. That’s the dispositive question we should be trying to answer when we talk about labor and automation, whether or not we’re talking about AI.
Effective AI Criticism
Angela Frances Hui
Your book is about how to be an effective AI critic. Can you tell us more about what effective AI criticism entails and, conversely, what it means to be an ineffective AI critic?
Cory Doctorow
If you believe, as I do, that the toxic thing about AI is the bubble, then you have to attack the material basis of the bubble.
https://jacobin.com/2026/06/ai-bubble-layoffs-workers-copyright]