The term isn’t just about which half is human though, it’s about the dynamic flip in humans relationship with tooling.

The “tool” part of the centaur is the horse body. All of the hard to duplicate bits of a human (reasoning, processing, fine motor skills) with the strength and speed of a horse. A reverse centaur is when a complex system is designed that needs a “dumb human” to do the complex bits while the system uses humans as an appendage.

Reverse centaur may sound clunky but is a really elegant one liner for Doctorow’s thesis.