“The mere fact of dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – hundreds of thousands of Amazon workers, billions of social media users – turns the majority of the world’s other humans into phantasms”
Doctorow’s point about scale is the useful part. You do not need a villain to get cruelty at Amazon, you need a dashboard where a bathroom break is a variance from target. The “reverse centaur” framing names the actual arrangement, where the human takes orders from the software instead of the other way around. Every company that tells you AI will augment workers is describing the same org chart with nicer words.