The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI

The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After A.I

Cory Doctorow

Audio by Paper2Audio.

Jonathan Worth

Introduction

n May 2025, the internet briefly chose a new, unfortunate main character: Marco Buscaglia, a Chicago-based freelance writer behind a syndicated summer reading list. Though the list was credited to him, he wasn't its principal author. Rather, the list was written by a chatbot.

We know this is true for two reasons. First, because ten of the fifteen books on the list were nonexistent. They were A.I “hallucinations” (a term that A.I boosters use because it sounds sexier than “errors”). Second, because Buscaglia confessed to using a chatbot, in an interview with the veteran tech reporter Jason Koebler, who cofounded the journalist-owned news site 404 Media.

In Koebler's article, Buscaglia admits that he used a chatbot to source the list, and blames the inclusion of nonexistent books on the list on his own oversight: "I do use A.I for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious."

Buscaglia comes across as utterly mortified, telling of multitools, speaking to experts and manufacturers' representatives, in order to pick my top three and write a brief paragraph about each. These were fun assignments, but they were also serious and involved endless back-and-forth with the fact-checkers, even down to providing proof of how many different blades and attachments each tool had.

To be frank, there's no way that Buscaglia could have written all those lists and summer guides (including a guide to hammocks that features a quote from a nonexistent professor of leisure studies who is credited with writing a scholarly journal article on "hammock culture"—that paper also doesn't exist).

In 2025, any editor who assigns a freelancer to “write” the bulk of a sixty-four-page summer guide is either tacitly or explicitly commissioning that writer to confine their efforts to prompting a chatbot to barf up a bunch of plausible verbiage and hammer it into shape.

Buscaglia was asked to do the work of dozens of writers, researchers, editors, and fact-checkers, on a short timescale that guaranteed that the resulting product would be riddled with A.I-generated errors. We don't know how much Buscaglia was paid for this job, but it's a sure bet that it doesn't add up to the total salary of all the skilled professionals whose jobs he was asked to do.

In other words, Buscaglia was set up to fail. His job wasn't merely to oversee a chatbot—it was to absorb the blame for that chatbot's mistakes. permanent new feature: it can turn arbitrary amounts of recorded speech into pretty reliable transcripts, in a manner so efficient that my laptop's fan doesn't even turn on. The fact that Whisper is open-source means that it can be maintained forever, by anyone in the world who has the skills and desire to do so, no matter what happens to Whisper's manufacturer (a grossly overhyped and terrible firm called OpenAI).

Two freelance writers, using A.I. One was made miserable and embarrassed by his A.I usage. The other had a delightful experience, saved a bunch of time, and produced a better piece of writing. How to explain the paradox?

One possibility is that the difference lies in how we used A.I. I used A.I to transcribe some audio, whereas Buscaglia used it to generate some writing.

Though I don't brainstorm with A.I or other forms of automated or random text generation, I don't have a moral objection to these practices. There are plenty of writers who find text generation to be a productive tool for producing excellent work. The Dadaists' "cut-ups" involved slicing phrases out of a manuscript and scrambling them around, looking for serendipitous juxtapositions.

Writers delight in Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's "Oblique Strategies" deck, which contains fifty-five cards printed with mysterious orders ("Be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever not done before"). The Surrealists loved their "Exquisite Corpse," in which a group of these features I use. I work for myself, after all, so if I don't want to use the grammar checker (hell no), that's my business. No one expects me to write more pages when I get a new tool. A couple of years ago, a former student of mine asked me to try out his L.L.M tool that would help me write dialogue and flesh out characters. I played with it for ten minutes and then never went back to it. No one told me I was being uncooperative or spoiling a grand plan to increase efficiency and realize cost savings by refusing to use A.I. Sometimes, when I'm really stuck, I write with a pen in a notebook. No one cares, except me.

A reverse centaur is a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine. There's a classic I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel are working on an assembly line at a chocolate factory, taking bonbons off the belt and wrapping them in paper. As the belt goes faster and faster, Lucy and Ethel have to work at superhuman speed. They're reverse centaurs: the machine can move the chocolates from one place to another, but it needs a human to pack them into the box, and the humans who act as its assistant are made to work at a pace that exceeds all human capacity until calamity ensues.

I Love Lucy played that bit for laughs. Amazon warehouse workers get the horror-movie version. They are observed by A.I-equipped cameras that time their movements and monitor their “time off-task,” penalizing them if they fail to make quota. Amazon warehouse workers experience the highest level of on-the-job injuries in the rolling around your neighborhood. They have to sign into at least nine separate apps, and they are continuously scored based on their driving performance, as assessed by various A.I tools. Drivers lose points for braking or swerving (even if that's the only way to avoid a sudden road hazard) or for deviating from the proscribed route set by the A.I (even if there are obstructions or hazards). Drivers have impossible-to-meet quotas and the per-parcel compensation rate drops if they fail to meet it. Drivers are forbidden from peeing in bottles, but also given no time to urinate. The driver is just a peripheral for the van, present only because the van can't drive itself or get your parcel onto your porch. They are a reverse centaur.

This centaur/reverse centaur distinction is the heart of the paradox at the heart of the debate about the usefulness of A.I tools. When you find yourself surrounded by people swearing that a given tool is worse than useless and others swearing that it has made their lives easier and better, you can bet that the former group is made up of reverse centaurs who've had A.I imposed upon them, the latter group is all centaurs who've gotten to make up their own minds about where, when, and how to use A.I tools. The solution to the paradox is to stop thinking about what the gadget does, and pay attention to who the gadget does it to and who the gadget does it for. The important part isn't the technical characteristics of the device, it's the power relationships of the people who use the device.

It's been a long time since I last held a factory job. it's just not realistic to want a computer that a) works and b) takes orders from you, not me.

This is a cheap bully's trick: insisting that their abusive behavior is out of their hands, that they are merely acting in accord with some kind of iron law or great force of history. Margaret Thatcher was the world champion of this: she insisted that her cruel program of austerity and privation was inevitable, repeating the phrase “There is no alternative” so often that wags started referring to her as “Tina” (“There Is No Alternative”).

Thatcher's contemporary successors are to be found in the C-suites of the tech industry.

Call this philosophy inevitabilism, the insistence that there is only one conceivable way to do things, and any problems you're experiencing aren't anyone's fault, they're just inescapable reality. The fact that the world is filled with sneaky Bluetooth sniffers that track your location as you walk through shopping centers or even just down the street isn't something you can blame a person or a company for; it's just a fact.

Science fiction is, an anti-inevitabilist literature. Science fiction is only incidentally about thinking up new gadgets and explaining what they do. Far more important than what the gadget does is who it does it to and who it does it for. As the legendary science fiction editor Gardner Dozois once wrote, “Most S.F can predict the car, some S.F can predict the drive-in theater, but S.F that can predict the changes in teen-age sexual behavior as a result of the impressive feats in both parsing and generating language and images and sounds. There are lots of interesting, fun, and productive ways to use this technology. There is nothing about the technology of A.I that determines how it must be used. We can choose to use it sometimes, or never, or all the time, depending on our needs and proclivities. We don't have to let billionaires tell us how it must be used.

Margaret Thatcher's "There is no alternative" has a fine rejoinder in the science fiction writer William Gibson's famous maxim, "The street finds its own use for things."

S.F writers make lousy prophets, but we can be pretty good technology critics.