centaur / reverse centaur (free copy)
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6 August 2026
Centaurs and reverse centaurs are currently being discussed on various podcasts as Cory Doctorow, the man who brought us the term enshittification, the 2003 American Dialect Society Word of the Year, has been flacking his latest book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.
The word centaur, of course, refers to the mythological, hybrid creature that has the head, torso, and arms of a human and the body and legs of a horse. The word was borrowed into Old English from the Latin centaurus, which in turn comes from the Greek kένταυρος. But Doctorow is using a jargon term from the world of automation in which a centaur is a pairing of human and machine, where human intelligence, the head, directs the machine that provides the figurative horsepower and speed.
This technological sense of centaur is almost a century old. We see the metaphor in Booth Tarkington’s 1929 The World Does Move:
A racing car on the way to some track contest swept perilously by us at seventy miles an hour; we saw a monoplane “stunt flying” at a faster speed than that, and thus were made aware of the presence of the new athlete, the Twentieth Century's realization of the centaur fantasy, half-man, half-machine, and at his topmost far greater hero to the people than any Marathon runner, discus thrower, charioteer or home-run batter has ever been.
And by 1944 we see the metaphor distilled down to the noun. From Wilhelm Keilau’s 1944 Norway in World History:
Through the centre of the painting a long row of tanks roll towards the foreground; in each open turret a steel-clad warrior laughs triumphantly, proud of his power; he is the modern centaur: half man, half machine.
Twenty-five years later the mechanical had become the electronic and centaurs encompassed human-computer hybrids. From a 1969 conference paper by W. Grey Walter:
Even in the utilitarian field of prosthetic design the replacement of a hand or a leg with a “new! improved!” version may require direct coupling to the nervous system and this again may suggest “improvements” at a higher level. We have already played with a system to control a computer directly from the electric waves that precede a voluntary decision, and know that our control would be better if our surgical friends would implant electrodes in suitable parts of our brains. We can imagine quite easily the evolution of a hybrid robot, a cybernetic Centaur or even Minotaur—a man half machine, machine half man.
At the turn of the twentieth-first century, the world of chess took up the term with the advent of Advanced Chess, a.k.a. Centaur Chess, a form of the game in which humans are permitted to use computers to enhance their play. The following exchange took place on the Usenet group rec.games.chess.computer on 2 December which indicates the centaur was already widely used in this community:
Knob Nose: Has anybody played with this new Analysis Board? It would be interesting to compare notes on what could be done with it.
Gian-Carlo Pascutto: I find it most useful in Centaur/Advanced chess, where it can be used to check the variants the engine produces for deep hidden threats.
Knob Nose: What is “Centaur/Advanced chess”?
Jeroen ;-} A centaur is a mythical creature with the head and torso of a man joined to the body of a horse. So it is a combination of two. It has been translated to the combination of man and machine, operating as one.
Centaur chess or more common, advanced chess, is a player playing chess with (legal) computer assistance.
Newspapers soon began to pick up on the chess jargon.We see an oblique use of the word in this way in the New York Times of 6 February 2003:
Mr. Kasparov champions the idea of “advanced chess,” in which humans compete by using sanctioned computer software during the game, and he has participated in one such game. The future of chess, Mr. Kasparov and others suggest, lies not in the competition between man and machine, but in their fusion.
On the Internet site of ChessBase, a leading publisher of chess programs, a Centaur Room is set aside for people who want to play as a team with their computers.
And we see it being used directly in an article in the February 2015 issue of KM World, the KM standing for knowledge management:
In 2005, an advanced chess tournament took place that allowed any combination of humans and computers. Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen, who only held amateur status in Elo (named after physics professor Arpad Elo) chess rankings, took their regular desktop computers and squeezed them for their purposes. They won that tournament against chess masters with superior chess ratings and even superior hardware and software. Both players had leveraged their expertise to align computing power to win chess games. They created a superior team comprising humans and machines. In essence, a new form of chess intelligence had emerged. Kasparov concluded, “Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.”
Kasparov coined the term “centaur” to describe that human-machine combination. The Greek mythological creature consists of a human torso with head and arms and the body and legs of a horse.
As we have seen, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, who has competed in many “human vs. machine” events, did not coin the term, and I am not aware of an instance of him using centaur in this context. He seems to have preferred the term advanced chess.
A reverse centaur, in contrast, is where the machine directs the human to do tasks that are too difficult to automate. This term is in place by September 2021 when it appears in an article in the journal PLOS One:
Current trends point to “reverse centaurs” when it comes to automation. Given that it is easier to manage humans using algorithms (e.g. organise taxi drivers) vs performing the actual task (e.g. autonomous cars), there is a certain market tendency to extract profits from over-exploitation. Instead of machines aiding humans (i.e. what is called a “centaur” in chess), we run the risk of economies of very low wages where humans help machines (i.e. more akin to a very boring and intensive production line, hence “reverse centaur”).
And Doctorow uses reverse centaur in a blog post from 17 April 2022:
In AI circles, a “centaur” describes a certain kind of machine/human collaboration, in which “decision-support” systems (which the field loves to call “AI”s) are paired with human beings for results that draw upon the strengths of each, such as when a human chess master and a chess-playing computer program collaborate to smash their competition.
[…]
But even though an Amazon driver represents the tight coupling of a human and a machine to do more than either could do on their own, that’s not the kind of centaur that we talk about when it’s a chess master paired with a chess program. That chess master is being augmented by the machine, and the machine is the junior partner in the relationship. The human is the head, and the AI is the body.
By contrast, an Amazon driver is a reverse-centaur. The AI is in charge, and the human is the junior partner. The AI is the head, telling the body what to do. The driver is the body — the slow-witted, ambulatory meat that is puppeteered by the AI master.
Sources:
Doctorow, Cory. “Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs.” Pluralistic, 17 April 2022.
Harmon, Amy. “Queen, Captured by Mouse: More Chess Players Use Computers for Edge.” New York Times, 6 February 2003, B6/6. ProQuest Newspapers.
Holtel, Stefan. “From Computer to Centaur: Cognitive Tools Turn the Rules Upside Down.” KM World, February 2015, 18/1–2. ProQuest Magazines.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2016, s.v. centaur, n.
Samothrakis, Spyridon. “Artificial Intelligence Inspired Methods for the Allocation of Common Goods and Services.” PLOS One, 16.9, September 2021. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0257399.