Cory Doctorow returns to the Plutopia podcast to discuss The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI and the struggle over who controls technology in the workplace. He distinguishes between “centaurs,” workers who use machines to enhance their skills, and “reverse centaurs,” people forced to serve automated systems while absorbing the blame for their failures. Cory argues that AI’s immediate dangers lie in corporate efforts to cut jobs, intensify workloads, and weaken bargaining power, alongside environmental costs and financial instability. He makes the case for unions, collective action, and antitrust enforcement, explaining why individual shopping choices and expanded copyright protections cannot substitute for organized resistance. The conversation also explores building movements across political divides, the limits of property rights, and the intertwined growth of corporate and government surveillance, with an emphasis on protecting human agency, privacy, and workers’ rights.
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Cory Doctorow:
In automation theory, a person who is assisted by a machine, we call them a centaur. The metaphor here is you’ve got a human head and the horse’s body. So the discernment, the judgment, that’s all coming from the person. But the strength, the endurance, the speed, that’s coming from the horse’s body, from the machine. And so, you know, whether you’re using a spell checker or riding a bicycle, You might be a centaur. And the corollary of that, of course, is that when you are being bossed around by the machine, when you’re recruited to be a peripheral for the machine, when you’re an assistant whose schedule is being set by the machine, you’re a reverse centaur. You are the horse’s head on the human’s body. That’s not a good place to be.
Portrait by Jonathan Worth