Cory Doctorow Says AI Bubble Pushes Humans Into Reverse Centaur Role

Cory Doctorow argues that worrying about whether AI can do your job is a “blind alley,” and he instead points to what he calls AI’s “bubble.”

“Last year, we featured a lengthy interview with tech journalist/science fiction author Cory Doctorow about his book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It”

Ars Technica

In automation theory, Doctorow says a centaur is “someone who is assisted by a tool,” while a reverse centaur is “someone who’s recruited to assist a machine.”

Ars Technica

Doctorow describes the reverse centaur dynamic as one where “the owner of a machine will want to utilize the machine to its maximum throughput,” pushing humans to become “the slowest part of the system.”

Ars Technica quotes Doctorow saying he “sort[s] out the bullshit from the material reality,” and it adds that he portrays the reverse centaur as “a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.”

Jacobin presents Doctorow’s view that effective AI criticism must “attack the material basis of the bubble,” linking it to large tech firms that have saturated markets by attaining monopolies.

Doctorow tells Jacobin that firms want to convince Wall Street they can still grow because “companies that are growing have a much higher valuation than companies that are mature.”

EL PAÍS

Le Monde.fr describes Doctorow’s neologism “enshittification,” shared in a Twitter post in 2022, as a way to name “the degradation (a term popularized by British writer Cory Doctorow to refer to the deterioration of user experience on Internet platforms)” that users have experienced on digital platforms.

EL PAÍS warns that “AI eats its users,” arguing that large-scale commercial deployment will involve “manipulating users, their desires, and now their thoughts,” as advertising and monetization expand into tools like virtual assistants.

Ars Technica describes a scenario Doctorow contrasts with medical uses of AI, saying it is “quite another to fire nine out of 10 radiologists and let AI make the diagnoses.”

“Worrying about whether AI can do your job is a blind alley, Cory Doctorow argues”

Jacobin

In that Ars Technica example, the remaining radiologist is “solely responsible for checking the AI’s work—and, ultimately, taking the blame for any errors.”

EL PAÍS argues that the danger is “more insidious” than job loss, warning that the boundaries between “objective information, algorithmic bias, and product placement would disappear entirely.”

To counter that, EL PAÍS says “To preserve a free and democratic society, we must display our books with pride,” calling reading “a highly effective and accessible personal antidote” and citing a lecture by neuroscientist Michel Desmurget in “Reading in 2050.”