Centaur or reverse centaur (Asterisk)
The question to ask of any AI deployment is not how much it automates. It is who ends up on top.
In a new Asterisk interview, historian Ada Palmer reaches for Cory Doctorow's distinction. A centaur puts the person on top, with the machine extending what they can do. A reverse centaur puts the person in the loop to serve the machine: checking its output, correcting its errors, running errands at its direction. Her observation is that people using AI in centaur mode often like it, while the miserable experiences tend to come from the reverse centaur position.
Both modes exist, and the centaur case deserves its due. In Palmer's account, scientists using machine learning and programmers using coding tools are genuinely amplified, and her own example is the city of Bowling Green, Kentucky, where a small team used a model to sort 8,000 citizen survey responses it could never have read itself. That is the tool working as advertised.
The trouble is that many enterprise rollouts are sold as the first mode and built as the second. The business case promises experts amplified and judgement freed for higher-value work, while the operating model that ships is a reviewer queue, an exception list and a quality metric, with the expertise drained out of the role and the person retained to absorb the machine's mistakes.
Novelist Ken Liu adds the longer view. We have spent a century scripting and measuring work until it resembled a machine process, so swapping the person for a model now looks like a small step. AI did not start that process. It is finishing it.
Which makes this a design choice rather than a technology outcome. A centaur keeps practising the skill the tool amplifies; a reverse centaur hands over the practice and keeps the chores. If your AI programme cannot say which of the two it is building for each role, it is building the second by default.
So look at your own deployment. How many of your people are on top, and how many are in the loop?
#FutureOfWork #AI #Leadership
Source: Asterisk, "Six Gutenberg revolutions in a row" (Ada Palmer and Ken Liu in conversation) https://lnkd.in/g-jw2iSW