Cory Doctorow: The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Criticizing AI

[Nevilledog]

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

I'm a science fiction writer, which means that my job is to make up futuristic parables about our current techno-social arrangements to interrogate not just what a gadget does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

What I don't do is predict the future. No one can predict the future, which is a good thing, since if the future were predictable, that would mean that what we all do couldn't change it. It would mean that the future was arriving on fixed rails and couldn't be steered.

Jesus Christ, what a miserable proposition!

Now, not everyone understands the distinction. They think sf writers are oracles, soothsayers. Unfortunately, even some of my colleagues labor under the delusion that they can "see the future."

But for every sf writer who deludes themselves into thinking that they are writing the future, there are a hundred sf fans who believe that they are reading the future, and a depressing number of those people appear to have become AI bros. The fact that these guys can't shut up about the day that their spicy autocomplete machine will wake up and turn us all into paperclips has led many confused journalists and conference organizers to try to get me to comment on the future of AI.

That's a thing I strenuously resisted doing, because I wasted two years of my life explaining patiently and repeatedly why I thought crypto was stupid, and getting relentless bollocked by cryptocurrency cultists who at first insisted that I just didn't understand crypto. And then, when I made it clear that I did understand crypto, insisted that I must be a paid shill.

This is literally what happens when you argue with Scientologists, and life is Just. Too. Short.

So I didn't want to get lured into another one of those quagmires, because on the one hand, I just don't think AI is that important of a technology, and on the other hand, I have very nuanced and complicated views about what's wrong, and not wrong, about AI, and it takes a long time to explain that stuff.

But people wouldn't stop asking, so I did what I always do. I wrote a book.

Over the summer I wrote a book about what I think about AI, which is really about what I think about AI criticism, and more specifically, how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: "How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm." I titled the book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish it in June, 2026.

But you don't have to wait until then because I am going to break down the entire book's thesis for you tonight, over the next 40 minutes. I am going to talk fast.

#

Start with what a reverse centaur is. In automation theory, a "centaur" is a person who is assisted by a machine. You're a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

Like an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras, that monitor the driver's eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver's mouth because singing isn't allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they don't make quota.

The driver is in that van because the van can't drive itself and can't get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance. But the driver is human, so the van doesn't just use the driver. The van uses the driver up.

*snip*


I know that Doctorow's work is open source, but it's just too long to post it here and I think it's too difficult to read.

[hunter]

1. Speaking of Amazon...

Abandon shipment: how an Amazon van got marooned on the UK’s ‘most dangerous path’

Driver reportedly checked with base and was told to continue when GPS directed van on to Essex mudflats

People thought they were looking at an AI image: an Amazon delivery van half-submerged at the mouth of the Thames estuary where it meets the North Sea. “I thought someone had just knocked up a photograph,” says local guide Kevin Brown about first seeing it online.

It turned out the image was genuine, and it proliferated. There was something delightfully primordial about it – such a dominant sight of modern street life, just out there on the mud, vulnerable and surrounded by nothingness. Banter followed, images of an Amazon package floating in sea water: Amazon has made your delivery.

-- more, with picture --

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/17/how-amazon-van-marooned-uk-most-dangerous-path-essex

Seems a perfect example...

[HAB911]

2. Thank you for this

reading it, I flash back to "Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler, putting things into perspective in an engaging and easily understood form.

[Kid Berwyn]

3. Very Important OP

“But the driver is human, so the van doesn't just use the driver. The van uses the driver up.”

Too bad. So sad. “Human Resources.” Har har.

However, that’s just one possible future.