Cory Doctorow
Author, activist and journalist whose novels include Little Brother, Walkaway and Radicalized and whose nonfiction includes Enshittification and The Reverse Cen...
“A radiologist who examines x-rays and gets a second opinion from the AI when the AI disagrees is doing their job at a higher degree of fidelity, and that stops people from dying of cancer. Versus the radiologist who sees nine-tenths of their colleagues fired and who then has to review 100 times as many x-rays that the AI has vetted and says are cancer-free. If the AI is wrong 3% of the time, they're probably going to miss all of it and then people are going to die. … That's the social arrangement of the machine, not the technical capabilities of it.”
Software Engineering Daily · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · September 2026
Context
Doctorow was explaining his book's distinction between a centaur, a human using a machine, and a reverse centaur, a human conscripted as the machine's peripheral. He had just invoked automation blindness, the well-documented finding that people cannot stay vigilant for rare failures, and cited TSA screeners missing most red-team weapons. His point is that the same tool produces opposite outcomes depending on who deploys it and why.
Transcript
…their particular edge. That's what vibe coding is for. It's not for submitting PRs to a big open source project that has a lot of people who rely on it and who are going to get right up the maintainer's butt when it stops breaking, when it stops working for the good reason that they rely on it.
…folks in a corporate landscape. You know, the sitting down with someone one-on-one, helping them, working with them and developing personal rapport is particularly useful for coworkers, especially if you have a senior engineer helping a junior who's been much more AI trained and focused than them.
…nine-tenths of their colleagues fired and who then has to review 100 times as many x-rays that the AI has vetted and says are cancer-free. And they have to make sure that the AI is right. And if the AI is wrong 3% of the time, they're probably going to miss all of it and then people are going to die. And, you know, that's not what. Machine does. That's who it does it for and who it does it to. That's the social arrangement of the machine, not the technical capabilities of it.
To me, that was probably the most impactful example of a reverse centaur versus a centaur itself. And I do want to talk to you, Ashley, about what you quote as dog shit Ugnit economics. But first, I have to ask, for the sake of the technical users, there are a lot of people who are trying to…
Well, so the DCS haiku arguably is still a felony, unfortunately, because Section 1200 of the DMCA is very bad. And Judge, a very dumb judge who has done a bunch of terrible things in his career, including letting the Sacklers off, decided that the people who published 2600 magazine were not…
It doesn't seem practical. I really wish we could spend more time talking about what goes into this. You also have content in the book about scraping and how that can be very, very good. But we do have to move towards the end of the interview. So let's talk about what comes next. What is dog shit…
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