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.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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So a centaur is a human head on a machine's body.

You have something that's tireless.

You have something that's fast.

You have something that can do physical feats that the human can't do, but the judgment is left up to the person.

And, you know, you ride a bicycle, you're a centaur.

You even look like one.

You use a spell checker, you're a centaur.

You use an IDE to program or a debugger.

You know, my first programming environment, a basic interpreter on an Apple II Plus did not have a debugger, right?

So, like, all of these things are ways of becoming...

a person in charge of a machine and the machine helps you do your work.

A reverse centaur is the reverse.

A reverse centaur is when the machine directs the activity of the human, right?

And the human is conscripted to be a peripheral for the machine.

So,

Think of an Amazon driver watched by all of those cameras.

Your route is set by AI that's determining where you have to go, and your pay scale varies by up to 500%.

So the minimum pay scale per parcel is $0.10.

The maximum is $0.50, and that variation is entirely based on your compliance with the machine's orders.

So that's a very reverse centaur arrangement.

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