Passengers, Centaurs, and Reverse Centaurs

As you go down the path of using AI in your everyday work, you’re going to stumble across a problem. For some of you it’s already familiar. Others feel it but can’t quite put a name to it yet.

For me, it showed up while I was sitting at my computer, watching the AI load, waiting for it to finish just so I could prompt it again. I wasn’t thinking about the problem anymore. I was just waiting for my turn to push the button. And I noticed a slight sense of dullness.

That dullness is the feeling of outsourcing the one thing that makes you most valuable as a human: your judgment.

It’s getting easier every month to hand our judgment to AI, and the downsides aren’t always obvious. Say you’re building a PowerPoint. You give it a rough first pass, hand it off to the AI, look at the results, and think, “Eh, sure. I could have gone with that… I guess.” Nothing is wrong with the deck. You just didn’t really make it.

One of those moments is nothing. But if you’re like me, the little cuts, day after day and decision after decision, start to wear on you.

The Cost

Think of your judgment as a muscle. Every call you make yourself is a rep: you decide, see how it plays out, and adjust. That’s what keeps it strong.

When AI makes the call and you just approve it, you skip the rep. The muscle atrophies without you noticing in the moment, the way an astronaut’s legs do in zero gravity. You can float through a project feeling great, then land the spaceship and find out your legs don’t work anymore. That faint dullness is your early warning: the one sign you get before your legs give out.

This isn’t just a hunch, either. A 2025 survey of knowledge workers by researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon found that the more people trusted AI with a task, the less critical thinking they reported putting into it.

And that’s where it compounds. The less critical thinking you put into today’s task, the less you have to draw on for tomorrow’s, which makes handing off the next one even more tempting. It’s a vicious cycle.

Thinking, Doing, and Judging

Every piece of work you do breaks down roughly into three parts:

Thinking: working the problem
Doing: producing the thing
Judging: deciding whether it’s right, and what happens next

For each one, you can keep it, augment it with AI, or outsource it entirely. Where you land on each is your AI mindset.

	Thinking	Doing	Judging
Holdout	Kept	Kept	Kept
Passenger	Outsourced	Outsourced	Outsourced
Centaur	Augmented	Outsourced	Kept
Reverse Centaur	Outsourced	Kept	Outsourced

These aren’t personality types. Most of us shift between all four depending on the task. You might be a centaur while building the deck and a passenger while deciding which deck to build. The goal isn’t to become one of these permanently. It’s to notice which one you’re being on the work that matters.

The Holdout

Nothing is outsourced.

The holdout doesn’t use AI at all. Their judgment is fully intact, but they’re plowing by hand while the farm next door bought a tractor. They aren’t the villain of this story, just the slowest character in it. I include them so it’s clear the goal isn’t less AI. It’s AI in the right places.

The Passenger

Thinking, doing, and judging are all outsourced.

The passenger is on the horse, but they’ve let go of the reins. They run every decision, workflow, and process through AI and go wherever it takes them. This person was voted “Most likely to ask AI what their kid wants for their birthday” and has a chat window open at all times. If you’ve gotten an email from them, it probably opened with “You’re absolutely right” and had an em dash in every paragraph.

The pros: They’re genuinely fluent with the tools and may know how to use AI to boost their productivity better than anyone.

The cons: They’ve likely lost the judgment needed to tell whether that’s true.

The Centaur

Doing is outsourced, thinking is augmented, judgment is kept.

The centaur is the sweet spot. Picture the creature: the body of a horse, the torso of a human. The horse does the hauling: data cleanup, first-draft slides, inbox triage, all the menial but necessary work. The human holds the reins.

Their thinking is augmented, not replaced. They bounce ideas off the AI, brainstorm with it, and ask it to poke holes, but the final thought and the final decision stay theirs. The quality of the work is on them, and they’ll happily stamp their name on anything that goes out. They’re open about using AI the same way a farmer isn’t embarrassed to use a tractor.

The pros: They get the speed without losing their edge. Because they keep making the calls, their judgment keeps getting exercised, and it gets sharper.

The cons: It takes effort. They have to decide every time what to hand off, and resist handing off the hard part when they’re tired.

The Reverse Centaur

Thinking and judgment are outsourced. They’re stuck with the doing.

Credit to Cory Doctorow for this term.

This is the one to avoid. The reverse centaur hands the most human parts of the work to AI, usually because judgment is genuinely hard, and keeps the menial parts, usually because they haven’t figured out how to delegate them. They ask AI what to work on, then go off and do it by hand.

It sounds ridiculous, but I’ve caught myself doing it in small ways. I’ve asked an AI which formula to use in Excel, then gone off and typed it in myself. Helpful? Sure. But the AI did the thinking while I did the typing. Scale that up, and it looks like asking AI which of your three projects to prioritize, taking its pick without pushing back, and then spending the afternoon building the slides for it by hand. That’s the deal exactly backwards.

The pros: They’re getting answers.

The cons: They get the worst of both worlds: none of the speed and none of the judgment.

Keep building the muscle

Before anything goes out, ask yourself: could I defend this decision without saying “the AI suggested it”? If yes, you’re steering. If not, the horse is.
Then check the other direction: what am I doing by hand that I’d gladly hand off if someone offered? That’s work for the horse.

Back to the dullness

That dull feeling isn’t a sign to stop using AI. It’s a signal that the reins slipped.

A farmer doesn’t feel dull driving a tractor, because they still decide where the field gets plowed. Keep the decisions, hand off the hauling, and the tool makes you sharper instead of duller.

Notes and credits

On the names. The centaur and reverse centaur aren’t originally mine, and plenty of people have used them to describe how humans work with machines. “Centaur” goes back to Garry Kasparov’s “centaur chess,” where human-plus-computer teams played together. It was later used to describe patterns of AI use in a 2023 Harvard Business School and BCG study of consultants using GPT-4 (Dell’Acqua et al., “Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier”), where centaurs split work cleanly between themselves and the AI. “Reverse centaur” comes from Cory Doctorow, who uses it to describe a person who ends up serving the machine instead of the other way around.

I’m borrowing those names but sorting people by a different question: who’s holding the judgment?

On the survey. Lee et al., “The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking,” CHI 2025, Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University.