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Archive of stories in "Reverse Centaurs"

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Reverse Centaurs

Archive

Archive of stories in "Reverse Centaurs"

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Deborah Ko

·

Nov 1

The Necessity for Experts in the AI Era: Moving Furniture vs. Knocking Down Load-Bearing Walls

GenAI is a great equalizer for exploring new domains, but our own biases make it tempting to assume specialists aren’t important or merely…

The Necessity for Experts in the AI Era: Moving Furniture vs. Knocking Down Load-Bearing Walls

Amber Field

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Oct 20

Book Review: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow

It’s Important That We All Understand the AI Bubble Right Now

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI — Book Cover; guy with a horse’s head and human legs

Cory Doctorow

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Oct 6

Swapping money for expertise

Money can’t buy me love.

The First Bank of Chicago, a Grecian temple to money. It is surrounded by flames. A skeleton in academic robes and mortarboards has been lynched from its roof. In the foreground are banded packages of US $100 bills.

Jeff Will

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Aug 23

Don’t Become a Reverse Centaur

When AI Assistance Becomes AI Dependence

Don’t Become a Reverse Centaur

Cory Doctorow

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Aug 3

Dualism

Why not both?

A man’s bearded face, constructed out of a medieval hillside, with walls, buildings, trees, hayricks and boulders forming the features. It has been hand-tinted. It looks across at an inverted, blurred, rippling version of itself. The background is a detail from a 19th C French anatomical chart depicting many different ear shapes.

Cory Doctorow

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May 14

Kickstarting “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI”

How to be a better AI critic.

A mockup of a smartphone displaying an audiobook app that’s playing ‘Enshittification’. Next to it appears this text: ‘This book — ostensibly about AI, but more broadly about the new world of hyper-capitalism and high tech — is stunning in its clarity and breadth of vision. In trying to keep some kind of grasp on what is going on in the world, I read Doctorow obsessively. — Brian Eno’

Tejas Bharadwaj

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Jan 28

Designing for, with, beside — and against AI

Navigating a new era of design that can’t escape AI integration.

Designing for, with, beside — and against AI

Cory Doctorow

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Jan 5

A world without people

AI is a promise to wire the boss’s toy steering wheel directly into the company’s drive-train.

Cory Doctorow

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Dec 5, 2025

The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

My speech for U Washington’s Neuroscience, AI and Society lecture series.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington%20The%20staring%20red%20eye%20of%20HAL%209000%20from%20Stanley%20Kubrick%E2%80%99s%20%E2%80%982001:%20A%20Space%20Odyssey.%20In%20the%20center%20is%20the%20poop%20emoji%20from%20the%20cover%20of%20the%20US%20edition%20of%20%E2%80%98Enshittification,%E2%80%99%20with%20angry%20eyebrows%20and%20a%20black,%20grawlix-scrawled%20bar%20over%20its%20mouth.%20The%20poop%20emoji%E2%80%99s%20eyes%20have%20also%20been%20replaced%20with%20the%20HAL%20eye.%20Image:%20Cryteria%20(modified)%20https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg%20CC%20BY%203.0%20https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.

Cory Doctorow

·

Oct 23, 2025

Checking in on the state of Amazon’s chickenized reverse-centaurs

When your shitty boss is a shitty app and you’re not even allowed to call yourself an employee.

Checking in on the state of Amazon’s chickenized reverse-centaurs