I picked this up at my local bookstore completely by chance. I didn’t know Doctorow had a new book out, and I like his non-fiction generally, so I bought it on the spot. It turned out to be a signed copy, which was a nice bonus.

The title is worth explaining. A centaur, in the usual telling, is a person made more capable by a machine. A reverse centaur is the arrangement flipped around. The machine does the work, and the person is bolted onto it to handle the parts it can’t, at the machine’s pace and on the machine’s terms.

The idea I keep coming back to is what Doctorow calls automation blindness:

when your job is to review something that is usually fine, you eventually lose the ability to spot when it’s not fine

This isn’t about diligence, it is about what months of near-unbroken correctness do to a person’s attention. This is worth reflecting on, because a great many of the current proposals for keeping humans in the loop on AI systems are describing precisely this job.

There is an argument about science fiction that I thought was the cleanest thing in the book:

Science fiction tells us that the most important aspect of a new technology isn’t what the machine does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to.

That reframing does a lot of work, and it applies well beyond AI.

The sharpest point, though, is about who the marketing is aimed at. Doctorow argues that the AI hype isn’t pitched at consumers at all, it is pitched at investors. The breathless capability claims, the stories about models escaping their sandbox, the general fear of missing out, all of it makes far more sense as investor communication than as an attempt to sell a product to anybody. Once you look at it that way it is difficult to stop, and it seems even more obvious now that both Anthropic and OpenAI are running towards IPOs.

Taken as a whole it is a critique of the current AI landscape as something that is making almost everyone worse off while a small number of people at the very top do extremely well out of it.

He also has some genuinely useful observations about how to cope with what all of this is doing to workplaces, which I appreciated, because that part of the conversation is usually either missing or naive.

An inspiring read in the end, which is what I have come to expect from him.

All quotes are from The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow.