Centaurs and cyborgs
Ethan Mollick's names for two ways of working well with AI: centaurs split a job, keeping some tasks and handing others to AI, while cyborgs go back and forth with it inside a single task. Vivienne Ming adds a weaker third style, the self-automator, who hands over the thinking.
Also called: centaur work · cyborg work · self-automators · ways of working with AI
Connections
Understand first
Ideas this one builds on.
Related
Often used together or easily confused.
Resources that teach it
- A Conversation with Dr. Vivienne Ming, author of Robot-Proof (garden)
- A top researcher says a new divide is emerging in AI use, and most people are on the losing side (garden)
- Vivienne Ming on hybrid collective intelligence, building cyborgs, meta-uncertainty, and the unknown infinite (garden)
- In Conversation... with Vivienne Ming (garden)
- Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier (garden)
- Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI (garden)
Competency
Find centaurs and cyborgs on the commons map ↗
You may know it from
- chess centaur chess After losing to Deep Blue, Garry Kasparov promoted a format where a person and a computer play as one team; the name 'centaur' comes from there.
In plain words
In 2023, researchers gave 758 Boston Consulting Group consultants access to GPT-4. Writing about the results, Ethan Mollick noticed two patterns among the people who used it well. Centaurs drew a clear line, for example doing the analysis themselves and handing the slide drafts to AI. Cyborgs blended the two, writing a sentence, asking AI to extend it, editing, asking again.
Both styles keep a person judging the work, and both depend on knowing which tasks fall inside the AI’s strengths, the jagged frontier. Vivienne Ming describes a third style, the self-automator, who hands over the whole task and the thinking with it. She calls it the weakest of the three. In a forecasting experiment she has described in interviews but not yet published, the cyborgs did best.
Centaur work is easier to check; cyborg work can do better when you stay alert.
Example
A policy analyst writing a briefing works as a centaur on the numbers, which she checks herself, and as a cyborg on the wording, trading paragraphs with AI until the tone fits.
How it connects
- Builds on the jagged frontier: both styles depend on knowing where AI is strong.
- The self-automator is cognitive offloading gone too far; productive friction pushes back.
- Both styles keep a human in the loop.
Try it
On your next task with AI, notice which style you used. Then do a similar task in the other style and compare the results and how much you had to check.
Read this card as plain Markdown: /concepts/con-centaurs-and-cyborgs.md. Know a parallel from your own field, or a product that implements this? Add it.