Who is the machine working for?

You've been handed a new AI tool at work. It drafts the reports now. Your job is to read every one, catch what it gets wrong, and put your name at the bottom. The volume has tripled. The deadline hasn't moved. Somewhere along the way you stopped doing the work and started supervising a machine that does it badly.Cory Doctorow has a name for you. A Reverse Centaur. The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI skips the usual extremes of effortless abundance and mass obsolescence. He looks at ordinary jobs and asks a plainer question. When the machine arrives, who ends up working for whom?Head or bodyThe book hinges on a term from automation theory, with a nod to Greek myth. A centaur is a person assisted by a machine. You stay in control. The tool takes the friction out of the work and you point it at what matters.A reverse centaur flips the idea. The human is conscripted into assisting the machine. The machine sets the pace and the human does the clean-up, at a speed nobody chose.…