As a software engineer with 5 years of experience, I work on the core backup & recovery features of Zmanda, an enterprise backup and recovery product. I have strong skills in software design, cloud-native development, and delivery. I also foster effective communication and collaboration among the development team, architects, product owners, and business owners. I contribute to some open-source projects and share my technical insights on my blog.
First we need to know, what is a centaur
A centaur is a human working with a machine to enhance their abilities and perform a complex task. For example, a matematician using a calculator to find the 42nd decimal of pi OR a farmer using a plough to dig fields.
A reverse centaur is the opposite where a machine requires a human to complete a specific part of the task it's not good at. The concept of a reverse centaur was purely theoretical all this while. The definitions online that I found while researching about this concept are slight more fear inducing.
"Reverse Centaur: A machine head on a human body; a frail human conscripted to work at an inhuman, relentless pace dictated by a system or algorithm."
I read about this concept in this article and from then I have been thinking about it a lot. In the article or one of the links within the article described how Amazon optimized it's product picking problem in warehouses.
The centaur was an Amazon employee who would use machines to go to the product and pick. The human is good at picking up a product but is not fast enough to pick thousands of products. Amazon found that the human can pick way more products in one hour compared to a robot; but the human could not get fast to a product compared to a robot. The optimization Amazon did was to build automation systems which would bring the product to the human and the human would decide what's the best way to pick it. The human at the Amazon shipping facility is now a reverse centaur. Now, think about this and what we are doing in our day to day jobs as software engineers, consultants or any other domain where AI has taken over.
In the not so distant past, we were centaurs using hardware and software tools to solve problems in our respective domains of work. We used tools like a laptop and software tools like an operating system and a programming language to solve some a problem like appointment booking, order management, supply chain or a anything else.
Humans are very good at collaboration and solving problems; but we are not very fast in doing that. We solved various manual business processes using programming languages because we have the ability to understand a process, what parts of the problem are automatable and then convert it in to a workflow which can be repeated thousands of times. The problem with this is that collaboration with humans also comes with it's own challenges and can delay solutions for months or even years. The cost of getting people together, establishing a common understanding, planning work items, implementing, evaluating the results and delivering the end result took months, years, or even decades. This is similar to the picking problem at Amazon. The human is really good at deciding what to solve, describing the problem, the acceptance criteria and what is not an acceptable solution. We were centaurs.
Enter our new reality, we are all reverse centaurs. Amazon bought the picking problem to the human, in our reality we are "prompting" our way with AI; which puts on various different hats and removes the various challenges described above. Organizations have realized that humans with AI can deliver roughly 10x more work than others who do not use AI. Like how Amazon brought products to the human to pick products, organizations are investing heavily in AI to solve 100s of different problems but leave it to the human reviewer to define the acceptance criteria and accept/reject a solution. The human here has the cognitive load of reading tons of output text, understanding what's been accomplished and decide. I have written about this in the past. AI right now (even the most advanced models) need to be prompted or need a human in the loop at least to define what problem must be solved and whether a problem is worth solving.
I don't have any conclusion for this article, it's just thought provoking piece I wanted to write about in my own words. My last 2 blogs were written using AI; I dictated by thoughts and had AI convert those thoughts in to a piece of work people would want to read. In this case was I a centaur or a reverse centaur?
A leader at my workplace and I were discussing about how our OpenClaw/Hermes Agents are contributing to the "Dead internet" (I will probably right about it in the next blog). In that conversation we found that AI with some agency and proactive improvement AI Agents can be centaurs themselves with minimal or no supervision.
