Running Harder, Falling Faster: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs

{ "name": "Running Harder, Falling Faster: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs", "description": "AI and digital platforms promise a friction-free future, yet the systems taking shape around us depend on hidden human labor, powerful corporate interests, and business models that demand more and more of those they purport to serve. In Cory Doctorow\u2019s formulation, the defining metaphor may not be the centaur\u2014a human enhanced by a machine\u2014but the \u201creverse centaur\u201d: a person driven by the force of an an automated system.Join author and activist Cory Doctorow and Dr. Elizabeth Mynatt, Dean of Northeastern University\u2019s Khoury College of Computer Sciences, for a conversation about the structural, economic, and human stakes of this reversal. Drawing on his work on platform \u201censhittification\u201d fostered by corporate monopoly, Doctorow asks us to focus not only on what technology does, but whom it is done to, who benefits, and who bears its costs. Mynatt brings a human-centered computing perspective, considering how technologies can instead be designed around human needs, agency, and care.Together, they will explore a central challenge for AI development and governance: what legal, economic, and design choices can keep technology accountable to the people whose lives it shapes? What would it take to ensure that humans remain its beneficiaries, not its infrastructure?Copies of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It and The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence\u2014Before It's Too Late will be available for purchase.", "startDate": "2026-09-30", "endDate": "2026-09-30", "startTime": "18:00", "endTime": "19:30", "location": "1557 Massachusetts Ave., , 5th Floor, Cambridge, MA, 02138, US", "label": "Add to Calendar", "options": [ "Apple", "Google", "iCal", "Microsoft365", "MicrosoftTeams", "Yahoo" ], "timeZone": "US/Eastern", "trigger": "click", "inline": true, "listStyle": "modal", "iCalFileName": "Event 304967" }