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Doctorow’s centaur frame
Tech journalist and science fiction author Cory Doctorow argues that the key to understanding AI is not the technology itself but the role it plays for the people it is used on.
“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”
In Ars Technica’s account, Doctorow describes a “centaur” in automation theory as a human augmented with a technology, and he contrasts it with a reverse centaur as “a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine,” which he said in a speech last December.
Ars Technica also highlights Doctorow’s example of an Amazon delivery driver surrounded by AI cameras monitoring their driving, portraying the worker as a peripheral to the delivery van.
Ars Technica further ties the concept to a specific medical scenario, saying it’s “quite another to fire nine out of 10 radiologists and let AI make the diagnoses, with the remaining radiologist solely responsible for checking the AI’s work—and, ultimately, taking the blame for any errors.”
Criticizing the bubble
Jacobin presents Doctorow’s view that worrying about whether AI can do your job is a “blind alley,” and instead frames the real danger as “AI’s bubble,” a speculative fantasy built on replacing workers with systems that can’t actually do what their salesmen promise.
In that same interview, Doctorow says, “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.”
Ars Technica similarly describes Doctorow’s approach as an attempt to “sort out the bullshit from the material reality,” while noting that he “doesn’t actually enjoy talking about AI” even as he’s constantly asked to comment.
Jacobin also quotes Doctorow explaining that if the toxic thing about AI is the bubble, then critics have to “attack the material basis of the bubble,” pointing to large tech firms that have saturated markets by attaining monopolies and trying to convince Wall Street they can still grow.
Where the stakes land
Ars Technica describes a concrete workplace shift in radiology, where it says AI is used to make diagnoses while a reduced set of radiologists is left to check the AI’s work and take blame for errors.
“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”
Jacobin places those labor stakes inside a broader pattern of AI-driven institutional change, saying that as artificial intelligence continues its “inexorable march through human institutions,” its popularity appears to be reaching “an early nadir.”
Jacobin also links that march to specific social and economic pressures, including workers across the country bracing for layoffs blamed on AI and AI companies spending “hundreds of billions of dollars on environmentally destructive data centers.”
In Ars Technica’s framing, Doctorow’s critique is also personal and rhetorical, since he says, “I made the tactical error of being sick of talking about AI,” and then explains that he wrote a book about why he thinks it’s “a dumb thing to keep asking people to talk about,” even as the industry keeps demanding attention.
