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Last year we showed a a long interview is a technology journalist/science fiction writer Cory Doctorow about his book, Enshittification: Why Everything Got Worse and What to Do About It. The prolific Doctorow is back with a compelling new book that serves as a follow-up of sorts, focusing on AI and related issues: Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.
Doctorow doesn’t really like to talk about AI, but he is constantly asked to explain it. “I made the mistake of getting sick of talking about AI,” Doctorow told Ars. “So I wrote a book about why I think it’s a dumb thing to ask people to talk about, and now I have to talk about it.” Reverse Centaur and Doctorow’s attempt to “eliminate the cow from realism.”
In the sense of automation, according to Doctorow, a “centaur” describes a person motivated by technology, such as machine learning, even driving a car, or using autocomplete. A reverse centaur “is a mechanical head on a human body, a human being serving as the animal counterpart of a mindless machine,” said Doctorow in a speech last December. He gave the example of an Amazon driver, surrounded by AI cameras monitoring their driving, which actually works as a barrier for a delivery truck.
