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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
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Cory Doctorow shared the exact same opinion in this interview he gave this week. I personally don't think his "reverse centaur" idea is nearly as catchy or worth adopting as enshittification was, but the intent behind it is spot on.
Doctorow tries to coin shit all the time and most times it doesn't stick. This goes faaaaaar back in his personal history.
Reverse centaur is a terrible term. Even having heard it explained, repeatedly, I could not even explain what it means. It's not catchy, too many weird syllables; the word "centaur" makes it sound nerdy as fuck for any casual use, I doubt most normal people even remember what a centaur is; and it just does not immediately convey it's meaning as a result.
It's very simple: a computer controlling a human as a flesh robot instead of the other way around.
Think Amazon drivers, for instance. No autonomy whatsoever, no thinking, no decisions, just eyes, feet, and hands for the machine.
Late stage capitalism existential / body horror, and a wet dream for corporations.
I have no doubt our generation and later will never retire. They'll just plug a chip into our nape and keep our corpses working until they fall apart. 40K was off by 38 centuries.
What is it even supposed to mean?
centaur: brain of a man, speed of a horse. reverse centaur: brain of a horse, speed of a man.
but the horse is the computer.
The horse is the computer...?
It's in the computer?
Yeah, basically. lime's summary was rather curt, but basically accurate. He explains his intent really well in the interview I linked above, or I assume you can find his writing or text-based interviews somewhere online. Here's a mostly-good summary of the idea in a review of his book on the topic:
In the centaur scenario, the human radiologist is basically doing their job as they do now, but occasionally the AI might pop in and say "hey, check that one a bit closer". It helps them find possible errors they've made. The reverse centaur reduces the human's job to in theory validating the AI's results, but because of a phenomenon called "cognitive surrender"—which has been talked about since before AI but has become very popular over the last year or two—they end up just ticking "yes". Think Homer Simpson in that episode where he works from home and uses a drinking bird toy to just press "y". The human is providing the "leg work", so to speak, for the AI's thinking.
(and before anyone comments on it. alt+0151. I've been using em dashes regularly since like 2009, and I refuse to let AI steal that from me.)
you do the manual labour while the computer makes the decisions.
The computer is the horse
Ah, of course.
of course