A centaur is a legendary creature from Greek Mythology that has the head, arms, and torso of a human and the body and legs of a horse. The word is often used as a metaphorical term for any kind of a human rider: on horseback, on a bike, etc. Cory Doctorow coined the expression ‘reverse centaur’ for a human being conscripted as the assistant to a dominant machine – for example, a Uber driver, I will add a few words on that at the end of this post.
On Fri 11 September I attended a presentation of Doctorow’s book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late, Verso Books, ISBN-13 978-1836745525, at the House of Books & Friends in Manchester.
It was a fantastic experience. To start with, the venue was quite symbolic: a marvel of Victorian architecture (1871, designed in the Venetian Gothic style), the building of the former Reform Club, the meeting point of the city’s Liberal elite of the late 19th century: industrialists, politicians, writers, etc. The ground floor is now occupied by a leftist book shop with a small lecture hall for about 100-15o people (where the event was taking place). Manchester prides itself as being the birthplace of political Liberalism and the Free Trade movement. Andy Burnham, the recent Mayor of Manchester and now the Prime Minister of the UK, calls his own ideology Manchesterism. Not far from the Reform Club is something which was just set up by Andy and instantly got the moniker `Number 10 North,’ by analogy with 10 Downing Street: the second seat of the UK Government, for a better connection with the North of the country. Number 10 North is a boring office building. Its ground floor is taken by a second rate chain pub Slug and Lettuce. This looks hilarious.
Cory Doctorow’s talk was entirely about socio-economic issues. At the very beginning he said “Here in Manchester there is no need to remind you about the social consequences of automatisation of production”, which was met by the audience with a warm approval. Occasionally I felt that everything looked as if it was Friedrich Engels presenting his book `The Condition of the Working Class in England’ (famously written in Manchester and about Manchester).
Decades of lecturing to large audiences (up to 400 students) developed in me a habit of quickly scanning the crowd and assessing the numbers of people present who exhibited a particular body language or facial expression, say boredom / enthusiasm / rage (I call that `differential feedback‘). So on return home I was able to tell my wife that half of the audience behaved and reacted as if they were Marxists; Anna responded “And you, with your short white beard, was an obvious old Trotskyist.”
The book is a breath of fresh air. Strongly recommend.
Now a promised story of reverse centaurs driving Uber cars.
Preprint of my paper Calling a spade a spade: Mathematics in the new pattern of division of labour appeared on arXiv.org in 2014 (in 2016, it was published by Springer). This was the reason why in 2015 I was invited to an event in Brussels titled From Uber to Amazon Mechanical Turk: Non-traditional labour markets driven by technological and organisational change run by a think tank of the European Commission.
It was mostly about gig economy but one day was devoted to Uber which just started its aggressive expansion in Europe, in particular, in Brussels, where local taxi drivers were unhappy to get a much cheaper competitor and were threatening the city authorities with strikes and civil unrest. There were some issues within local politics as well. The EC was unable to interfere: at the meeting, I learnt with some astonishment, that EU had no shared labour legislation – in some countries, drivers were employees of Uber, in other – independent contractors. The aim of the event was to somehow analyse this mess.
My contribution to the analysis the Uber situation was modest, but worth mentioning. I explained that the two tasks, most difficult and critically important for a taxi driver, were almost completely removed from Uber drivers: (a) finding a way from A to B in a big city, and (b) communication with clients / passengers. A driver just turned the steering wheel on instructions from a computer. A person without knowledge of the city and unable to understand local languages could be a Uber driver. At that time, the words ‘reverse centaur’ still were not in circulation – otherwise I would be happy to use them. Anyway, an observation that a new technology could lead to a radical change in the cognitive nature of a particular profession (without eliminating it) appeared to be quite new for participants of the event (they were mostly economists and sociologists).