Published on Jan 17th, 2026.
View link on www.theguardian.com.
I really enjoyed this essay about the AI bubble from Cory Doctorow. He does an excellent job of succinctly describing what is happening through the lens of labor and capital- something that I’ve found especially difficult to articulate to fellow tech workers as this bubble has grown more severe.
This passage in particular stuck out to me:
In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.
A reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.
[…]
Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur. There are lots of AI tools that are potentially very centaurlike, but my thesis is that these tools are created and funded for the express purpose of creating reverse centaurs, which none of us want to be.
I really like this centaur metaphor. It packs a lot of complex theories about modern-day labor relations into a metaphor that can be easily explained. It’s an important and easy-to-spread idea.
Once explained through this lens, it’s easy to match the pressures everyone I know in the tech industry is currently feeling: the pressure for management to turn us into reverse centaurs. Some particularly egregious cases I’ve heard through friends:
It’s clear that we’re living in a world of a handful of tech emperors wearing some extremely fancy new clothes. It’s uncontroversial to say that this will collapse and take a lot of the economy down with it. With that in mind, I think it’s important for tech workers to have a common vocabulary and understanding of the forces at play here- something Cory does an excellent job of creating with this essay.