Cory Doctorow
speaker
2,714 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 2d ago
Cory Doctorow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
It was like getting a master's degree in mechanical engineering from MIT.
They weren't angry about the machines.
They were angry about the social arrangements of the machines.
Shelley, her novel was about Luddism and about this idea that when workers are not allowed to have co-determination and automation, that you have these horrible, hubristic,
machines that are unleashed on the world to the great detriment of everyone.
Her husband's maiden speech in the Lords, when he was made a Lord, was a speech in support of the Luddites.
It's really hard to overstate how popular the Luddites were in their day.
So, from the Luddites on,
There has been a broad understanding that when workers are in charge of automation, they tend to adopt automation in order to improve quality.
But when capital is in charge of automation, it tends to be to improve throughput.
And that's not because of the sinister character of the boss.
It's because of the economic relationship of a worker to a tool versus a boss to an asset.
When you acquire an asset and then it starts to depreciate off your books, you want to maximize your return on that asset, which means you want to maximize the utility you get from it, which means you want it used as much as possible.
And broadly, machines work faster and longer than people.
And so as soon as there's a machine on the premises, as the person who bought the machine and then employs people to use it,
You want those people to use the machine as much as possible, to produce as much as possible, to recoup as much as possible, and make as much profit as possible.
You're sweating the asset.
And so this is where we come to centaurs and reverse centaurs.
A centaur is someone who chooses to use a machine to make their work better.
They partner with a machine in order to do things that they can't do, and they set the pace and they direct the machine.
Showing 1121–1140 of 2,714 · page 57 of 136
← Previous
Next →