Cory Doctorow on the Right — and Wrong — Way to Criticize AI
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Cory Doctorow on the Right — and Wrong — Way to Criticize AI<br>Interview withCory Doctorow<br>Worrying about whether AI can do your job is a blind alley, Cory Doctorow argues. The real danger is AI’s bubble: a speculative fantasy built on convincing bosses to replace workers with systems that can’t actually do what their salesmen promise.
Cory Doctorow on the politics of AI: “As a science fiction writer, the one thing I know to be very true is that what a machine does is way less important than who the machine does it for and who the machine does it to.” (Tomohiro Ohsumi / Getty Images)<br>Our summer issue is out now. Get a discounted subscription to our print magazine today.
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Interview byAngela Frances HuiAs artificial intelligence continues its inexorable march through human institutions, its popularity appears to be reaching an early nadir. So far, the sector’s behavior almost seems tailor-made to provoke a negative response. In San Francisco, billboards and bus stop ads exhort employers to STOP HIRING HUMANS. Workers across the country brace for layoffs blamed on AI, and AI companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars on environmentally destructive data centers. You can’t talk to a customer service rep anymore, only a chatbot that tells you lies. AI slop is filling up social media feeds, Spotify playlists, and even academic journals and newspapers.<br>What is to be done?<br>Author and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow sets out to answer this question in his new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. The author of more than twenty books, including the 2025 hit Enshittification, Doctorow is well known for his perceptive and irreverent writing on Big Tech. Jacobin spoke with Doctorow about what’s driving the AI craze, how to be a good AI critic, and what we can do to protect ourselves in the age of AI.
Angela Frances Hui<br>I want to start off by asking about your book’s title. What is a reverse centaur, and why is it a useful concept when it comes to understanding AI?<br>Cory Doctorow<br>In automation theory, a centaur is someone who is assisted by a tool. Whenever you use a spellchecker, or ride a bicycle, you are a centaur. A reverse centaur is someone who’s recruited to assist a machine. The example everyone knows is Lucille Ball working in the chocolate factory — she and Ethel have to pluck chocolates off the assembly line and put them in the chocolate box. The owner of a machine will want to utilize the machine to its maximum throughput, because that’s how they make their money back. The human, the reverse centaur, is going to be the slowest part of the system. So, you crank up the machine to run at the very outer limit of the human being’s endurance and capability, which means that you’re not just using a person, you’re using a person up.<br>When you talk to people about AI, you get people who are skilled workers and historically reliable narrators of their own experience, and they tell you that using AI helps them in all kinds of ways and makes their work better. And then you meet people who, again, are skilled workers and reliable narrators of their experience, and they tell you that that very same AI tool is making them miserable, and they can’t believe how poor the quality of the work they’re producing is. My proposal here is that the answer to this conundrum is that the first group are centaurs, and the second group are reverse centaurs.
As a science fiction writer, the one thing I know to be very true is that what a machine does is way less important than who the machine does it for and who the machine does it to. That’s the dispositive question we should be trying to answer when we talk about labor and automation, whether or not we’re talking about AI.
Angela Frances Hui<br>Your book is about how to be an effective AI critic. Can you tell us more about what effective AI criticism entails and, conversely, what it means to be an ineffective AI critic?<br>Cory Doctorow<br>If you believe, as I do, that the toxic thing about AI is the bubble, then you have to attack the material basis of the bubble.<br>You have these very large tech firms that have saturated their markets by attaining monopolies, and they want to convince Wall Street that they can still grow, because companies that are growing have a much higher valuation than companies that are mature.<br>There’s this idea that capitalism has the ideology of a tumor, in that it wants to grow forever. I think that’s overstated, because it implies that capitalists want to maintain growth forever on some ideological basis. But...