Skip to content
Last Dictionary
Plane
Society, Ethics & EconomyCulture & SlangHistory & Landmarks
figurative

centaur

nounAlso: centaur chess, advanced chess, centaur model, cyborg (work style)

In plain wordsA human and an AI working as a team, each doing what it does best, like a chess player who consults a computer before every move. The name comes from the mythical half-human, half-horse creature.

  1. 1

    Human–AI collaboration

    A human–machine team in which a person and an AI system combine their strengths, the person typically supplying goals, judgment, context and accountability, and the machine supplying calculation, recall or generation. The image comes from chess, where in 2000s freestyle tournaments amateurs consulting several engines could beat grandmasters and strong engines alike, suggesting that a good collaboration process mattered more than either partner's raw strength. In studies of knowledge work, centaurs divide tasks cleanly between human and AI, whereas cyborgs interleave their work with the AI's at a fine grain. Whether centaurs keep an edge as AI improves is debated; in chess, the human partner's contribution shrank as engines strengthened.

    She works as a centaur: the model does the literature sweep, and she decides what the evidence means.

  2. 2

    Chess

    A player, or team, competing with the help of chess software in advanced or centaur chess, a format in which consulting engines during the game is permitted. Freestyle events let teams combine several people and several engines, and the format was used to study how human judgment and machine calculation combine.

Origin

Garry Kasparov organized the first advanced-chess match, in which each player used a computer, in León, Spain, in 1998, and championed the centaur idea; a 2005 online freestyle tournament won by two amateurs running several engines became its emblem. Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Ethan Mollick and colleagues contrasted centaurs and cyborgs in their 2023 study of consultants.

Related

See also
  • augmentationaugmentation, n.: Using AI to help people do their work better or faster while they stay in charge, instead of having the AI do the job on its own.
  • intelligence augmentationintelligence augmentation, n.: Using computers to make people smarter and more capable rather than building machines that think on their own: AI as a tool for human minds.
  • jagged frontierjagged frontier, n.: The uneven edge of what AI can do: it may excel at some hard tasks yet fail at seemingly easier ones, so how hard a task looks is a poor guide to whether AI can handle it.
  • co-intelligenceco-intelligence, n.: Ethan Mollick's term for working and thinking alongside AI as a partner — treating it like a capable but odd colleague whose strengths and blind spots you learn through experience.
  • human-in-the-loophuman-in-the-loop, adj.: Describes AI systems in which a person checks, corrects or approves the machine's work at key points, rather than letting it act entirely on its own.
  • Turing trapTuring trap, n.: The risk that by building AI mainly to imitate and replace people, rather than to extend what people can do, society ends up with less widely shared prosperity and weaker bargaining power for workers.
Contrast with
  • automationautomation, n.: Using machines or software to do work that people would otherwise do, from factory robots to programs that sort email or write reports.

Sources

  1. Kasparov, G. (2017). Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins. PublicAffairs.

Mentioned in

copilotcopilot, n.: An AI assistant built into software that works alongside a person — suggesting code, drafting text or answering questions — while the person stays in charge, like a co-pilot beside the captain., augmentationaugmentation, n.: Using AI to help people do their work better or faster while they stay in charge, instead of having the AI do the job on its own., Garry KasparovGarry Kasparov, prop. n.: A Russian chess world champion whose 1997 loss to IBM's Deep Blue computer became the symbol of machines overtaking people, and who later championed humans and computers working together., human-in-the-loophuman-in-the-loop, adj.: Describes AI systems in which a person checks, corrects or approves the machine's work at key points, rather than letting it act entirely on its own., intelligence augmentationintelligence augmentation, n.: Using computers to make people smarter and more capable rather than building machines that think on their own: AI as a tool for human minds., jagged frontierjagged frontier, n.: The uneven edge of what AI can do: it may excel at some hard tasks yet fail at seemingly easier ones, so how hard a task looks is a poor guide to whether AI can handle it., algorithm aversionalgorithm aversion, n.: Losing faith in a computer's predictions after watching it slip up once or twice, and turning back to human judgment even though the machine remains the better forecaster., co-intelligenceco-intelligence, n.: Ethan Mollick's term for working and thinking alongside AI as a partner — treating it like a capable but odd colleague whose strengths and blind spots you learn through experience., Ethan MollickEthan Mollick, prop. n.: An American management professor at Wharton whose experiments and popular writing on how people use AI at work introduced ideas such as the 'jagged frontier'., J. C. R. LickliderJ. C. R. Licklider, prop. n.: An American psychologist who envisioned people and computers working in close partnership, and whose US government funding built early AI research and the precursor of the internet.