The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late

by Cory Doctorow

Whether you want to criticise, kill, or use AI, you have to get through the hype and uncover the real story. Start with in automation theory, a centaur is a person who chooses to use technology to help them do the things that matter to them. A reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a helper for a machine, at an inhuman, machine a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code. As Doctorow it's not enough to ask what the technology does - we have to understand who it's doing it for and who it's doing it to.

The intended audience for AI hype isn't the people who are forced to use AI. The AI show is a performance staged for bosses and investors. . Investment bankers claim AI will to be worth more than $16 a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of "value," every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI.

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. When the AI bubble bursts, what will we salvage? Is there something in the wreckage that everyday people will find useful? In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI - as he so successfully did in Enshittification - Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life "after" AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Audiobook, Politics, Artificial Intelligence, Science, Adult

238 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 23, 2026

About the author

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of the YA graphic novel In Real Life, the nonfiction business book Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free, and young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema, and Little Brother and novels for adults like Rapture Of The Nerds and Makers. He is a Fellow for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[David Dayen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. They won't let me rate it because it's not out yet. Buy this, it's the most succinct expression of what AI portends and how it should be thought about.

[Edie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been telling everyone all about my plans for a solarpunk summer. (In case you haven't heard yet, get ready for Solarpunk Summer '26! Now that you know, you will start to see it everywhere.) Cory Doctorow's latest is exactly the book to kick it off. The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI explains the AI bubble, coming collapse, what we can do about it, and what we should use from it. Solarpunk is about using technology in sustainable ways for collective flourishing. Doctorow's description of how to use AI appropriately explains the concept in detail with concrete examples. This book explores the financial, social, and ethical quandaries we find ourselves collectively wading through as we navigate the AI minefield and gives suggestions for paths forward. I truly appreciate the author's approach - AI is not the problem, the way we choose to use it and leverage it is. The financial house of cards will collapse and when it does, there are bits and bobs to save. This is the book I will be thrusting into people's hands when I talk about the stock market and alternative investments. (Which I do much too often because as much as I promise myself I will stop giving unsolicited advice, I can't seem to help it.) This isn't a doom & gloom book. It is a book about what to do while and after things go boom. Thank you to Cory Doctorow, Macmillan Audio, and NetGalley for the audioARC.

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘A reverse centaur is a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine.’

‘This centaur/reverse centaur distinction is the heart of the paradox at the heart of the debate about the usefulness of AI tools. When you find yourself surrounded by people swearing that a given tool is worse than useless and others swearing that it has madeo their lives easier and better, you can bet that the former group is made up of reverse centaurs who’ve had AI imposed upon them, the latter group is all centaurs who’ve gotten to make up their own minds about where, when, and how to use AI tools. The solution to the paradox is to stop thinking about what the gadget does, and pay attention to who the gadget does it to and who the gadget does it for. The important part isn’t the technical characteristics of the device, it’s the power relationships of the people who use the device.’

‘The social arrangements of technology are a choice, not an inevitability.’

‘Successor technologies to the cash register—like mobile phone attachments that let people process credit card transactions—allow creative workers to sell directly to passersby at art fairs, comic-cons, and flea markets. They enhance the welfare and improve the material circumstances of workers. The most important thing about the gadget isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to.’

‘Inevitabilists will tell you a version of this story whose moral is, See, you take the good with the bad. They’re wrong. You don’t have to take the good with the bad. You can get the good without the bad. The difference isn’t to be found in what a technology does; it’s in what your boss uses the technology to inflict upon you. If you want to get the good without the bad, you need to switch from fighting technologies to fighting bosses.’

‘The IG app, for example, tracks everything from how quickly you scroll, what’s on the screen when you stop scrolling (or just slow down), even readings from your phone’s accelerometer—how you’re holding and moving your phone while you interact with their app. All this can be correlated with your location, the specifications of your device, and your other activities—the places you’ve visited recently, the places you subsequently visit, the things you buy, and the people you converse with.’

‘The fact that your technology tools spy on you means that the tech workers who make those tools can be rewarded or punished based on your usage.’

‘The current AI bubble is being driven by large tech firms’ need to tell a growth story to investors, which means that this AI has to be deployed in a way that reduces wages, because that’s the only thing that customers will pay enough for to make all those investors’ money back and more besides. What’s more, the mere existence of a widely accepted AI story can help suppress the wages of workers, even before AI is deployed. Workers who anticipate their imminent replacement by AI can be bullied into accepting worse conditions, dropping unionization demands, and taking other measures that shift the distribution of a firm’s profits from investors to workers.’

‘Never forget that you aren’t the target for AI hype—investors are. To the extent that anyone thinks of you when designing the publicity and marketing campaigns for AI, they are merely hoping that you will be visibly and loudly impressed.’

‘And—sometimes the most efficient way to convince your real target to take action is to act on someone else, someone with little power or agency.’

‘Remember, you aren’t the audience for AI companies’ hype. The real audience is the finance sector. To the extent that you are targeted by AI messaging, it’s in hopes of getting you to evince some kind of behavior that makes investors think there’s something to this AI business.’

‘Tech workers, especially those early workers, were often people whose lives had been transformed for the better by their experiences with networked computers, and many wanted to bring those benefits to the whole world’

‘Does AI really make coders more efficient? That certainly doesn’t seem to be the case for junior coders, whose “vibe coding” efforts might produce quick-and-dirty tools for one-off usage—for example, a script to reformat a single text file, once—but who lack the depth of experience to vet AI-produced production code for subtle errors that accumulate as “technical debt” in the enterprise systems they work on. Worse: without the hard-won experience of creatively solving a succession of programming challenges, these junior coders may never develop the requisite depth of expertise needed to do a thorough review of AI-generated code.’

‘In a world of giant media cartels, giving creative workers new copyrights to bargain with is like giving your bullied schoolkid extra lunch money. It does not matter how much lunch money you give Junior, the bullies are just gonna take that, too. Give your kid enough lunch money and the bullies will amass a fortune large enough to bribe the principal to look the other way. Keep giving that kid more lunch money and the bullies will be able to afford a global advertising campaign demanding more lunch money for all those hungry kids.’

‘Here’s a rule of thumb for tech policy prescriptions. Anytime you find yourself, as a worker, rooting for the same policy as your boss, you should check and make sure you’re on the right side of history.’

‘At a moment when AI algorithms are dictating who gets hired, who gets a loan, and who goes to jail (as well as who gets bombed), Hinton dismisses all of these concerns as not “existentially serious,” and tells us that we need to put all our focus on the coming day when one of these prize AI mares gives birth to a locomotive.’

‘AI is a bubble, but not all bubbles are created equal. Start here, though: every bubble is bad. The foundation of a bubble isn’t just “irrational exuberance” in which retail investors—you and me—unwisely gamble our life savings and lose everything. Bubbles all have winners, and these winners don’t come out on top by accident. Before a stock swindler inflates a bubble, they first acquire a lot of whatever the bubble is for, so they can sell it to us, and make out like a literal and figurative bandit.’

‘Every bubble is a transfer of wealth from savers to crooks. Every bubble is bad. We shouldn’t have bubbles. The pump-and-dumpers who inflate these bubbles should face criminal sanctions. Regulators should intervene to prevent bubble formation in the first place. That said: not all bubbles are created equal. Some bubbles pop and leave nothing behind. These are the pure fraud bubbles.’

‘Defenders of AI will often cite other technologies that were costly at the outset, like the web itself, as evidence that AI will soon solve all its energy and scale problems. But the web revolution was a decade of unbroken drops in the cost of servicing each new web user. In economics terms, the web had great “unit economics”—the cost of each web session fell and fell, even as the cost of getting on the web (from hardware to software to connectivity) was also falling.’

‘Not so with AI. Each generation of AI foundation models has been vastly more expensive to train and operate than the previous generation. Not only that, but many refinements in AI that are meant to improve accuracy and reduce “hallucinations” involve breaking a prompt down into multiple pieces and prompting an AI to respond to each prompt, turning that response into a new prompt, over and over again, to produce “chains of thought.” These are, to quote Ed Zitron, “dogshit unit economics.” AI gets more expensive every time it adds a user. It gets more expensive every time it adds a feature. It gets more expensive every time it improves. This is the opposite of the conditions under which the web attained liftoff.’

‘Companies are not training new foundation models because the old ones are so profitable that their owners have gobs of cash left over to make even better ones. Every AI company is losing money, and the bigger the AI company is, the more money it’s losing. The biggest AI companies are losing billions per quarter.’

‘The financing for new models is coming from investors, and those investors are making a bet that the AI they’re funding will be so good that employers can fire half their workers and replace them with AI, with the proceeds split between AI companies’ customers, and the AI companies themselves. Failing that, they’re making a bet that AI companies’ sales staff can convince employers to fire half their employees and replace them with AI that can’t do their jobs, and that no one will figure this out until after the AI companies’ investors have cashed out.’

‘This may seem like a paltry and trivial outcome from hundreds of billions of dollars and gigatons of planet-killing carbon, because it is. The serious environmental costs of AI will be borne by everyone on the planet, and all the animals and plants we share it with, for hundreds of years to come. Much of that harm is already locked in, and all we can do now is think about how we will mitigate it—how we’ll treat the zoonotic plagues, where we’ll house the climate refugees, how we’ll evacuate our low-lying cities, and how we’ll douse the wildfires.’

‘The economic costs of the AI crash will also be felt around the world, for a generation or more. Those harms are also locked in. You can’t give a third of the S&P 500’s value over to seven money-losing AI companies that energetically pass the same $100 billion IOU around and around without creating the conditions for a prolonged, brutal, global crash.’

‘Remember: all bubbles are terrible, but some bubbles are productive. The stuff that’s left behind when the bubble pops is salvage. Just because we deplore the waste that went into its production, that doesn’t mean we have to contribute to that waste by discarding this perfectly good remnant. There are plenty of uses for chatbots, too. Many, many people report that “conversing” with a chatbot is therapeutic. That’s easy to believe—A chatbot “therapist” is more like an interactive journal, one that feeds you back bland—but increasingly personalised—responses as you spill your guts to it.’

‘To put this in the context of AI art: AI art is uncanny because it has the seeming of intent without an intender, and it grows more meaningful the more a human infuses it with communicative intent. An AI therapist is a chatbot that you iteratively prompt and re-prompt, and the sentences in its replies to you are a higher- and higher-fidelity expression of the communicative intent you infuse into the sentences you feed it. An AI therapy session is a creative work of literature in which you are the principal author and the chatbot is a coauthor that makes successively refined guesses about what you want to hear based on your responses to its responses (to your responses to its responses).’

‘Some people have experienced “AI psychosis” in which they have led their chatbots into extremely destructive conversations wherein the chatbot fed and amplified dangerous delusions. At least one person killed themselves after such an experience.’

‘It’s because this all arrived as part of an investment bubble that was inflated by attacking workers of all kinds, and that stands to destroy the planet and the economy, that we are forced to take sides as either “anti-AI” or “pro-AI.” It’s fine to be “anti–AI bubble,” but it’s pretty silly to be “anti–statistical analysis” and “anti–machine learning” and “anti–automated inference.” Long after the bubble is gone, many of these tools will recede to the status of boring utilities, nurtured by open-source weirdos and a few ambitious startups. That’s not the problem. The problem is that all of today’s nonsense applications of AI will do lasting damage, separate from these perfectly useful utilities.’

‘There’s the obvious, world-threatening harm done by the gigatons of CO2 emitted by AI data centers to perform the redundant and wasteful training processes and to serve queries. Then there’s the world of labour. We’ll see lots of people fired—not because an AI can do their job, but because an AI salesman can convince their credulous bosses to fire them and replace them with an AI that can’t do their job.’

‘That’ll be bad enough. Not only will good people lose their jobs, but the rest of us will lose the value those people produced when they did their jobs. We’ll get bad chatbot advice, bad chatbot diagnoses, bad chatbot recommendations. And then, when the bubble pops, we won’t even have that. Companies will go bust. The data centers where these giant money- and power-sucking foundation models are housed will go dark. This will be even worse than having shitty AI doing important work badly—it will be a time in which that important work won’t be done at all.’

‘The job of a good AI critic is to help pop the bubble as quickly as possible, before the walls of all our institutions are filled with this digital asbestos that we’ll be digging out for generations. To be a good AI critic is to understand the material origins of the bubble, and to strike at the material factors that keep it inflated.’

‘I do a lot of things, but above all, I’m a science fiction writer. I’ve been selling SF stories since I was a teenager. It’s really fun to think about AI, to carry on outlandish thought experiments that challenge us to examine what we think of as intelligence, as agency, as morality. Imaginative exercises, whether undertaken as fiction or as computer code, open your mind to strange possibilities and exciting ideas.’

‘But thought experiments aren’t plans. They’re not predictions. The fact that you’ve seen movies and read books with superintelligent AI in them doesn’t mean that AI is real. It doesn’t mean that it’s likely. It doesn’t even mean that it’s possible.’

‘Many technologists have been inspired by science fiction to create interesting and useful things. The AI scientists who dreamed of better interfaces and came up with the techniques underpinning image generators and large language models did something incredible—But they haven’t invented an intelligent being. They haven’t set in motion the tools to conjure up a new god or demon. They haven’t even invented a tool that can do your job for you.’

‘But there is one thing that—AI bosses who are gunning for generational, dynastic wealth by transforming us all into AI-lashed reverse centaurs—don’t want you to know. That thing is this: the future is up for grabs. It is not inevitable. AI isn’t a genie that can’t be put back into a bottle. How we use AI is up to us. Whether we use AI is up to us. The future can be ours, if we never stop remembering that the most important fact about a technology isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for, and who it does it to.’

[Mizuki Giffin]

This was phenomenal. It took complicated economic, technological, philosophical, and labour dimensions of AI and presented it in a way that was easy to understand, boiled down to the thesis that AI isn't made for us as users, but to investors for capital. I listened to the audiobook and the passion in Cory Doctorow's voice is infectious. While this is an infuriating topic, I also found myself laughing out loud as Doctorow highlights the absurdity of the AI hype we're living through. I couldn't recommend this more. 

[Cathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was really excellent. A comprehensive, well-supported response to the claim that “AI is here no matter what so we either fall in line or get left behind.” This narrative of inevitability, the warning of a world in which AI replaces all workers, is intentionally amplified in order to lure investors to continue feeding into a bubble that is destined to burst. Doctorow breaks down the hustle, the dubious ways these companies will count a user’s forced scrolling past an AI summary as “engagement,” creating inflated numbers that they can then pitch to investors, even if it’s all BS. It doesn’t matter that all these sites are now unusable, because the target of every pitch is the investor, not the user experience.

Doctorow is not anti AI, but anti the unregulated capitalism that enables unmitigated growth at any cost. He argues that once the bubble bursts, we will be able to determine how AI can actually be useful (an example he provides is of refugees being able to communicate more effectively with people in new countries thanks to improved translation services). But until that happens, it’s so much harder to focus on potential positives because we are all drowning in endless slop.

Anyway, thank you to my friend Jane for the rec and thank you to Libro.fm’s Librarian ARC program for the early copy.

[Cam Waller · Rating 5 out of 5]

shook

[Masha Kazankova · Rating 5 out of 5]

AI is not inevitable, and as with application of any technology, it’s important to understand who it does things to and who it does things for. Another example of great tech criticism that is quite accessible and focused on the wellbeing of the many, rather than the sickeningly high capital gains of the few.

[Nathania Calae · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think many of us are quite concerned with the future of AI. Questions like: now what; how do we go from here; who does this affect? Etc etc!

Look no further because this book has eased my anxieties whilst reminding me how dystopian our REALITY is lol. To preface: I recommend reading this author's 2025 release mainly because it works perfectly in tandem with this one. Thankfully, I listened to a podcast all about it, so I already had a basis for his ideas. I will say that this book isn't saying the most revolutionary things HOWEVER I do think that it is incredibly important, relevant, and most of all human. That's literally all anyone can ask for right now. I appreciated it, especially in audiobook form because of the authors vocal mannerisms (if that makes sense). This book makes sure to keep the readers engaged through its examples, definitions, and examinations which lends the book to be quite ‘bingeable’ and enjoyable, especially since it's such a short novel.

I really recommend this and I honestly might go back to read his last release!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for giving me an arc copy to review!!!

[Lance Eaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I supported Doctorow’s Kickstarter for the audiobook, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI , because I believe deeply in Doctorow’s work and ethic around publishing but also I regularly his work because feels like an inoculation against the tech bro BS that surrounds so many conversations about technology. The book continues his work and connects directly to Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, and How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. In many ways, it feels like the AI-specific version of the same larger project: look past the gadget, look past the hype, and look at the larger techno-social capitalist system that decides who benefits and who gets used up.

That is Doctorow at his best. He does not treat AI as magic, or as an inevitable apocalypse, or as a neutral tool that just happens to exist outside power. He keeps asking the better question: who does this technology do things for, and who does it do things to? That centaur/reverse centaur distinction is the book’s frame. There is a real difference between a person choosing a tool that helps them do their work and a person being forced to become the human assistant to a machine that is ultimately being used to de-skill, discipline, or replace them.

That nuance is appreciated given that the AI discourse feels stuck between two unhelpful poles: AI is the future and we should all worship it, or any use of AI is automatically horrible, limiting, and meaningless. To my delight and appreciation, Doctorow is much more interesting than that. He is deeply skeptical of the AI bubble, of the promises by tech bro trillionaires, of the sales pitch that AI will become the next employer revolution. And he leaves space for smaller, useful tools: voice-to-text, transcription, image manipulation, local models, things that are as he tells us boring in the best way. I was using voice-to-text to gather my own thoughts for this review, so that point felt especially relevant. There is something here. It just is not necessarily the thing being sold to us.

In this book, he does go into copyright, which some of you may know, I have lots of thoughts about given my professional background. Given how much of my own work has been in and around copyright, knowledge production, and AI, I found Doctorow’s argument both clarifying and affirming. He reinforces what I have thought for a while: AI itself does not challenge copyright in the way many people want it to. If we think it does, we may be misunderstanding copyright and misunderstanding who copyright usually serves. It generally does not serve creative artists. It often serves corporations.

Doctorow’s takedown of “copyright will save us from AI” is one of the strongest parts of the book because it moves the conversation away from a tempting yet inadequate answer and toward labor, bargaining power, ownership, and control. That is a harder conversation, and it is also the more honest one. A new copyright framework around AI training sounds appealing until you remember who usually owns, controls, and exploits copyright. If the solution is one more right that creators can be forced to sign away, then it may not be a solution at all. Ultimately, there’s not a clear pathway that will actually be successful to trying to end or dismiss AI on copyright claims. In many ways, that makes sense. It is not copying and as soon as you get into the claim that works “inspired’ by copyrighted artists, you largely collapse a whole bunch of possibilities about how we as humans learn (hint: we copy a lot until we can build from our insights).

Doctorow’s chapter on AI’s role in art does not just throw all of AI away. He is skeptical, rightly, of someone entering a prompt, accepting whatever the machine gives them, and putting it into the world without much thought or meaning-making. But he also recognizes that art has always been entangled with technology. To say this new technology can have no role in art feels too heavy-handed and historically shortsighted. We have had versions of this conversation before, and we are usually wrong when we insist that a new technology cannot possibly matter to art.

An interesting idea can be found and named in Doctorow’s work. The more we get sucked into the fetishizing, demonizing, or aggrandizing the narrative (even in from a critical lens), the more power we actually give over to it. It’s like it’s Pennywise, feeding and growing bigger on our fears. Every time we get sucked into that coversation, we’re feeding the beast. It’s not explicit but does emanate from the text.

Where the book gets harder for me is the “guide” part. Doctorow diagnoses the problem really well, yet he doesn’t really guide us through it beyond “thinking”. He points toward unions, worker control, co-ops, better social arrangements, and creative workers resisting becoming reverse centaurs. It does signal possibilities. He discusses the Writers Guild successful rejection of AI, but they are a class of workers with unusual leverage compared to the vast majority of people being pushed into reverse-centaur conditions. A lot of people do not have the agency, solidarity, money, time, or infrastructure to resist.

And even beyond the workplace, a lot of consumers will choose what is cheaper or faster because the system is designed that way. We see it in self-checkout. We see it in online ordering and delivery. We see it in the way convenience gets framed as individual choice. He doesn’t go so far to label those seeking convenience as villains, rather explains as how they may be creating pathways that lead to their own exploitation.

Knowing that these issues permeate AI as many of our other digital systems does not quite empower us.

I felt something similar with his discussion of agentic AI. Doctorow is right that agentic AI, especially as a commerce fantasy, is probably a dead end. The idea that we will all have bots comparison-shopping, negotiating, and improving outcomes for us runs straight into the reality that companies will use their own systems to counter ours, block transparency, and prevent real enrichment. In a country with no meaningful federal data protection laws around consumer data, that seems incredibly likely.

Still, I am not entirely convinced that means agentic AI has no value. When I use these tools, I am often approaching them less through the lens of capital and commerce and more through tinkering, exploring, and trying to do things I could not easily do before. That may not be the domain of this book, and maybe it is not Doctorow’s purpose here, but it just feels like a limitation. The critique of the investment pitch is strong while the sense of what individuals might do with these tools outside that pitch feels thinner. Of course, that does make sense of the book and its focus; it’s just his handling of agentic AI doesn’t have the same nuance that generative AI does (which makes me wonder if he has actually played with it).

Doctorow makes a persuasive case that the AI bubble is built on several houses of cards: financially, technically, and rhetorically. He is also right to push back against the glamorous superintelligence conversation when the real harms are predictive policing, wage theft, surveillance pricing, deepfakes, misinformation, and the redistribution of money and power upward. The obsession with whether AI is sentient or whether it will overpower us is such a distraction. The small, nimble, insidious uses are the ones most likely to creep in while everyone is looking elsewhere.

I finished the book asking, okay, what am I to do with this? If I am in a workplace where AI is being forced down my throat and I do not have meaningful ways to resist, what are my realistic options? How do we address these systems in ways that are thoughtful and not exhausting? Doctorow warns about the damage that could happen before the bubble bursts, and about the economic disaster that may follow, but the book does not really guide us through that. It gives me a better map of the trap without a better toolkit for living inside it.

That is not entirely fair to put on this book, and I know it is not fully Doctorow’s project. I deeply appreciate his analysis, his open access commitments, his Creative Commons practice, and the consistency of his work. I keep listening to his books and funding his audiobook Kickstarters because his voice is invaluable. After Enshittification, The Internet Con, and now this, there is also a slightly repetitive quality. Repetitive, informative that is not always breaking new ground. Some examples and arguments recur because they are central to his framework, but in this book, that repetition sometimes makes the limits of the “how” more visible.

Regardless, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is valuable. For Doctorow fans, it is another strong dose of clarity. For people who have not thought much about AI, it may be genuinely useful. And for people who are hypercritical of AI, it gives permission to have a more nuanced view: reject the bubble, reject the exploitation, reject the bosses trying to turn workers into reverse centaurs, but do not pretend every tool is meaningless just because the industry around it is rotten.

Doctorow is at his best when he is slicing through the capitalist approach to technology while still recognizing the individual or collective value (but not “Value”) of these tools. That is the strength of this book, even when it falls short as a guide. It helps clarify what AI is, what it is not, what is being sold to us, and who is likely to pay the cost. I just wish it left me with a clearer sense of what comes next.

[Brian Shevory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many thanks to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and NetGalley for sharing an advanced copy of Cory Doctorow’s timely and important new book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence- Before It’s Too Late. I was excited to find this book, especially less than a year after Doctorow’s excellent book Enshittification was published that details the various ways that tech companies and especially digital platforms offer less or worse service for higher premiums and fees over time. The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI also takes a critical look at the ways in which AI threatens to enshittify different areas of our lives if we buy into the hype and wild claims about it’s disruptive capabilities. If anything, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide… is truly a guide for how to manage expectations and reject both the overhyped proclamations of AI companies and the doomsayers’ nihilism and fears about a robopocalypse. Even more importantly, Doctorow highlights the impact of AI on different sectors of life, focusing especially on how AI consumes massive amounts of energy, water and other resources, for little in return. It’s an important book since AI is a major topic in so many fields, but it’s even more important to have this kind of critical perspective that examines how AI fits into other technological innovations and updates that have threatened to disrupt and change the ways we work, read, communicate, and experience entertainment.
Doctorow uses the idea of a centaur to explain how we can either use technology in our lives, or how technology can use us. For Doctorow, we should all be centaurs in our technology use. Centaurs are mythological creatures that have the torse and head of men but have the legs of a horse. When we use technology to our benefit or when we are assisted by technology, we are centaurs. He uses the example of driving a car or wearing hearing aids and using a calculator. We are in control of our use of technology to assist us in tasks. However, a reverse centaur is someone who is forced to assist a machine to manage its tasks or who are surveilled by machines to meet certain quotas for efficiency. Doctorow uses the famous I Love Lucy Episode where Lucy and Ethel work on the chocolate assembly line and struggle to keep up as the pace increases. He likens this to other major corporations that monitor driving and warehouse work that often limit bathroom breaks, surveilling and managing time and efforts to where humans are used up by machines. Thus, it’s clear that Doctorow is no luddite, and that he believes in technology and recognizes the various ways it enhances our lives. He’s also not against AI, as he notes a particularly useful application from an open source program that was able to transcribe massive amounts of audio data to find a quote from a podcast he was looking for. However, what Doctorow does oppose is the use of technology, and especially AI, to exploit workers, whether it is through the threats to their jobs, surveillance pricing and wagering, and its exploitation in the creative arts (visual arts, music, and even writing). Doctorow presents these ideas by examining the AI bubble before it arrived, where we currently are in the bubble, and looking at other bubbles that have burst, and considering how we can avoid the consequences of other similar bursts to jobs and the economy. I appreciated this perspective, especially since we tend to think of AI as a new technology that has only recently appeared, but he provides some instances of automation that people have promoted, and many times, there have been ulterior motives for the idea of automation. AI is no different where Doctorow examines the ways that promises and predictions are often presented as truths and capabilities. This kind of hype for the exaggerated possibilities and potentials leads investors to speculate on futures, driving up the stock value of companies. It’s that kind of speculation that enables prompts other companies to wade out into these new technologies. He cites notable failures like Google +, a failed social media venture from Google, and the Facebook’s failed attempt to pivot to video. In these instances, Doctorow examines how the companies latched on to new trends in technology, but manipulated the metrics or even the access to present a much more optimistic view of these technologies to attract more investors, where they can redistribute their money within their original company. It allows the company’s reputation to grow on promises, but not on actual delivery or outcomes. Doctorow notes similar practices with AI companies that allow them to promote possibilities and potential but not actually deliver.
The Bubble section explores these some of these possibilities, and more importantly to recognize the threats and implications and consequences that arise from the ways that AI is being pitched to major corporations. Most notably, Doctorow explores how AI’s promise to replace workers is something that corporate overlords salivate after. While this does seem to be a constant threat and something that we’re reminded of repeatedly with AI speculation, Doctorow provides several examples of AI that have never panned out. Whether it involves Wendy’s or Delta Airlines attempting to implement surveillance and/or surge pricing only to backtrack or instances of self-driving cars being flummoxed by cones placed on their hood or dragging pedestrians for considerable distances before stopping, there are many of the examples of implementations that failed to meet the hype or caused considerable backlash from local communities. And yet, due to the Byzantine Premium, when investors place extra value on an asset they don’t understand, the hype continues to outweigh the failures and investors continue to pour money into AI start-ups. Doctorow also reminds us of Stein’s Law, that reminds us that everything that cannot go on forever will eventually stop, and Doctorow provides suggestions that the hype and promises that have failed to materialize for AI indicate that there can only be so much innovation, leading to the eventual bubble bursting, which he argues “this will not be a good day. Remember: seven giant AI companies account for 35 percent of the U.S. stock market.”
There are a lot of other important predecessors that AI has followed a kind of blueprint for to amaze potential investors, from the Mechanical Turk, an 18th century automaton that was touted to play chess when it was really controlled by someone inside the machine, to more recent examples from 2021’s dancing Tesla Bot that was revealed to be a human in a robot suit to a robot bartender that was revealed to have a tele-operator. Amazingly, Doctorow also elicits some empathy for call center workers, who have been some of the first to experience job loss from AI chatbots, only to be frequently rehired. One of the most frightening areas that Doctorow documents AI’s creeping influence is in healthcare, where AI agents surveil contract nurses and offer jobs at lower rates to nurse’s with lower credit scores (with higher debt). As a field that requires continuing education and rewards advanced degrees while also requiring passing rigorous certification exams, it makes sense that nurses would probably have more loan debt than some other fields, but the idea that health care companies are partnering with AI technology firms to cut costs on care and staffing is wrong on many different levels. Doctorow also finds examples of radiologists and other specialists whose skills and training have been supplanted by AI reviews of scans and other reports. The findings indicate that serving as a reverse centaur to the AI review, that is reviewing the AI findings, has diminished the accuracy of these health care specialists to a large extent in the same way that other areas like TSA workers have shown diminished results, or an accountability sink, in spotting positive results when AI misses them.
I also appreciated Doctorow’s notes about AI and creativity, noting how AI art lacks a soul and does not deserve copyrighting. He gets a little in the weeds about the history of copyright law and how it applies to artists, while also examining how studios, record labels, and other large corporations have exploited copyright laws to benefit themselves over artists, but Doctorow seems clear in his argument against AI art. He also offers hope and a sense of community to push back against all of the hype and false promises of AI. He uses the Writer’s Guild strike from 2023. As he notes, the Writer’s Guild banded together to fight against AI replacing writers. They didn’t push against AI in totality but rather to replace writers and being able to use AI as needed. It’s this sense of strength in numbers, aligned with pushing back against dehumanizing and fear mongering that AI companies are stressing to hype up their products. While I’ll need to go back and re-read some of the chapters, this is an important and timely book; one that will provide a deeper dive into a wildly misunderstood technology and topic. It’s also important to check out the facts and details now, since there’s probably a good segment of the population using AI somewhat mindlessly and without much intention beyond entertainment or completing tasks quickly. I was amazed at the depth and breadth of this book, while also being relatively brief. Doctorow covers a lot of history and uses many different familiar (and often humorous) examples to make the complicated elements of AI technology and its business models more familiar and comprehensible. Highly recommended!

[JSB (Toastx2) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Reverse Centaur’s guide to life after AI (Cory Doctorow) | The upsides and pitfalls of AI in a convenient 4h36m package

Cory Doctorow’s upcoming audiobook, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, really landed with me. while the audiobook, print, and ebook will all be available in late june 2026, i gladly claimed a free review copy to listen to on my commute over the last week.

back when i read The Makers in 2010, i remember being struck by the Creative Commons notice attached to it. Cory Doctorow essentially said that his fear was not piracy, but obscurity. he encouraged people that, if they wanted to support him beyond buying a personal copy, they should buy copies for libraries so the book could reach people who otherwise would not have access to it. i thought that was incredible at the time. i think the same can be said about this non-fiction read. consume it, learn what you want from it, pass it on.

this new book points towards a different worry: the AI tech bubble, and what happens if or when it bursts.
i find this particularly interesting because i work for a company that uses AI as part of the background magic in our software. the work we do is absolutely part of creating what Doctorow describes as a “centaur.”

in the book, a centaur is a person whose human intelligence is augmented by technology. the human is still the brain, still making decisions, but technology acts like the horse body underneath them, helping them move faster, operate more efficiently, and extend their capabilities beyond what they could do alone.

a reverse centaur is the opposite. the technology becomes the brain, and the human becomes the legs. the worker is there to execute what the system dictates. Doctorow compares warehouse workers monitored by efficiency software and AI systems to reverse centaurs. he also points to coders who are pressured to produce lines of code at maximum speed in order to justify paychecks, even when that output is worse than what they could create if given more autonomy and time to think critically.

one of the most fascinating parts of the book is the breakdown of how the AI bubble ended up where it is, and why the potential fallout is so frightening.
i don’t remember the exact figures offhand, but Doctorow references a surprisingly small number of massive organizations representing an enormous percentage of american GDP. these companies are effectively placing bets against one another, pouring billions into AI infrastructure and services. the problem is that much of the “value” being demonstrated is circular.

one company invests in another. credits are issued. AI usage is recorded as revenue. that revenue is then used to prove growth and justify valuation. investors see one major company backing another, and the cycle compounds. money moves back and forth between organizations, inflating perceived success while making it increasingly difficult to identify what is actually sustainable.

it creates this strange, self-reinforcing ecosystem where hype itself becomes the product.

skipping further diatribe on macroeconomics, i admit that i notice pieces of AI hype engineering in my own life already. as a human using tech in a decidedly centaur manner, it drives me nuts because i can see the smoke and mirrors, and i know how we are being used.

one example from the book which i have experienced firsthand: for years, Google search reliably returned valuable results. over time, the system has shifted toward maximizing engagement rather than maximizing usefulness. shitty results encourage repeated searches, in turn creating more ad exposure.

now AI summaries are pushed to the top of nearly every search. the mandatory scrolling past AI and time on page all end up counting as “AI interaction” and serve as metrics to prove value.

sometimes those summaries are useful. sometimes they are genuinely terrible. but simply being displayed on page still gets counted as AI usage. it creates the illusion that these systems are universally valuable simply because they are unavoidable.
what frustrates me most is the lack of choice. i did not ask for an AI-generated search interpretation. i asked for direct results.

and that is really where Doctorow’s argument starts to come together.

he spends a lot of time discussing how public discourse around AI gets distorted. we are encouraged to obsess over whether AI will replace workers, whether it will generate harmful content, or whether it will eventually become some sci-fi superintelligence that overtakes humanity.
some of those fears are real. people absolutely can lose jobs because executives see opportunities to cut costs.

but Doctorow argues that these conversations also serve another purpose: they keep the hype cycle alive.

the more we argue about AI, the more attention the industry receives. fear becomes marketing. speculation becomes advertising. every conversation about apocalypse or disruption creates another opportunity for companies to pivot and say, “yes, but look at all the amazing things AI can do for you today.”

i could talk about this stuff all day but will instead suggest reading or listening to the book. not sold? thats fine. you have a month before release!? go to Doctorow’s website, Craphound, and check out the free one hour preview of the audiobook.

undiscussed here but included in the book: personal and corporate responsibility, AI ethics, circular training, environmental impact, post bubble tech salvage, lots of positive AI discourse to balance the negative (Doctorow is actually Pro-AI, anti-stupidity)
overall, Cory Doctorow delivers something that feels both grounded and urgent. if even a fraction of the economic concentration he describes is accurate, the consequences of that collapse would not stop with AI companies themselves. the ripple effects would hit the countless businesses, services, and tools that now depend on that same infrastructure and investment pipeline to survive.

it’s kind of a big deal.

[Richard Derus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Whether you want to criticize, kill, or use AI, you have to get through the hype and uncover the real story.

Start with labor: in automation theory, a centaur is a person who chooses to use technology to help them do the things that matter to them. A reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a helper for a machine, at an inhuman, machine pace: a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code. As Doctorow says: it's not enough to ask what the technology does—we have to understand who it's doing it for and who it's doing it to.

The intended audience for AI hype isn't the people who are forced to use AI. The AI show is a performance staged for bosses and investors. Investment bankers claim AI will to be worth more than $16 trillion: a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of "value," every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI.

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. When the AI bubble bursts, what will we salvage? Is there something in the wreckage that everyday people will find useful? In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI—as he so successfully did in Enshittification—Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life "after" AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The argument I myownself have against "AI" (which isn't and won't be intelligent the way humans are) is financial. There is an AI bubble running right now that's gifted us the utterly brummagem world's first trillionaire. Look a little more deeply into SpaceX's IPO, you'll see how much of it's built on AI (which was partially trained on stolen US Government data via the little dickweeds from DOGE).

It really looks a lot like a gigantic pump-and-dump scheme when one reads Author Cory's work as digested and documented in this scathing book. He's been in the trenches reporting on tech matters for what feels like forever. Enshittification , anyone? It must make the guy a crazy person to present his deeply researched, well sourced and informed conclusions to general apathy. It lights fires under some of us, my dude, so please don't stop!

Especially relevant to my eagerness to share this book with all y'all is the centering of "AI"'s intended impact on labor. It's Author Cory's clear statement that the bubble's partly fueled by tech scum's intense desire to destroy any power of workers over their work, the conditions and rewards thereof, and the very nature of employment as reconstituted post-Great Depression. Wealth inequality is something "AI" is designed to entrench.

I hope a skilled human copyeditor went over this book after my DRC was created. There are some amusing errors of fact that, honestly, trouble me a bit, eg referring to trustbusting under FDR instead of his distant cousin TR. Some other errors niggled at me, but...well...consider the subject matter, maybe these sorts of issues are proof positive of the validity of Author Cory's thesis...?

I'm very serious when I say this: reading this book can give you tools to manage your personal interactions with the "AI" being rammed down our unwilling throats to further enrich the riches scum ever to rise to the controlling positions they're now it. It can do this by alerting the complacent or avoidant reader to what is actually at risk in this economic bubble's inflation.

An easy prose style delivers a hard-to-fathom message. It's one of my favorite reads of 2026. Please get one and read it. Libraries are very likely to have copies in stock now. Of course, if you can, making the purchase for your own shelves or devices is the best way to support Author Cory in his quest to wake us all up to the threats...and the opportunities knowing they're there present...to our essential human nature.

[Eric Mesa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this early by being a Kickstarter backer. Also, I listened to the audiobook version

I blazed through The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. It’s not too hard, as the audiobook is only 5 hours long, but it was also incredibly engaging and I didn’t want to stop listening. I first found Cory Doctorow through his fiction which was what convinced me to try ebooks. His books were available under a creative commons license for free from his own website so it was risk-free. Since then I’ve continued to read both his fiction and non-fiction books.

If you’re not into science fiction or in the tech space, you’ve probably most recently come across Doctorow from his coining of the term Enshittification in his non-fiction book of the same name. It describes why current economic incentives lead to Internet services degrading over time. Doctorow brings the same analysis to the current AI hype in Reverse Centaur.

There are two key points that Doctorow makes about the AI situation in 2025 (when the book was written, but still applicable today). First, your view on AI depends on whether you are using AI (you are a centaur) or AI is using you (reverse centaur). Second, the AI hype mostly exists so that “old” tech companies can pretend they are still growth companies.

When it comes to the centaur/reverse centaur situation - this is not a new phenomenon, but AI is accelerating things. Essentially, it comes down to whether you have autonomy and creativity in your job or not. For instance, if you are a programmer who gets to choose when and how to use AI in the scope of your work, you will probably find it quite pleasant. It makes you a more effective programmer in the same way that an IDE makes you more effective by doing the programmer’s equivalent of spell check. But if your job is to validate what the AI is doing or to provide a human body to do what AI cannot - then the situation is immiserating and, perhaps even humiliating. The company wants to be able to fire you, but cannot because AI cannot deliver the package to your front porch.

The most important thing about the prior paragraph and that Dotorow points out throughout the book is that, like almost any other technology, AI is value-neutral. It is neither amazing nor horrible that it exists. What is good or bad is how it is used.

As for the growth company section of the book, it finally caused late stage capitalism to make sense to me. For the past few years I’ve been baffled at the fact that companies have to constantly be growing. I know more money is better than the same amount of money, especially if you have shareholders, but it still didn’t make sense to me to see companies exiting markets where they were MAKING A PROFIT, but not growing. I thought it was just a property of late stage capitalism to make everyone “stupid” when it comes to money because of greed. But this was almost too simplistically moralistic of me. What Doctorow explains is that a company that is seen as growing is valued more highly (higher stock price) than another company that is seen as mature. Stock price affects how much compensation they can give the C Suite and how much they can borrow from the bank. It also affects how much money they can magic out of thin air by creating more stock. (Within SOME limits) This is why Google is not content to own “all” search or be part of the mobile phone duopoly. This is why Facebook put so much money into the failed Metaverse. Once Doctorow explained this, the last 5 years of tech suddenly made sense!

What Doctorow does perfectly in this book is to take those two key points and thread them throughout all the examples he gives. He uses them to show why Google is so insistent on pushing AI onto us in Gmail and Google Docs. He uses it to explain the over-inflated AI claims. Suddenly the world makes so much more sense.

This is one of those books that I seriously recommend EVERYONE should read. Doctorow does a good job creating relatable examples and explaining the technology to a lay person. (I admit I’m not the perfect judge of this, but to my mind he didn’t just assume the reader knew about what I considered to be basic tech) AI hype is touching all of us and so I think you should share this book with everyone you know - whether they are a techie or not. As I said earlier, Doctorow is neither a booster nor a doomer. He talks about the bad - AI snake oil salesmen, data centers chugging our water and power, worse medical outcomes. He talks about the good - how it has helped him in his writing, how a non-profit he works with uses it to check government compliance, and so on. ESPECIALLY share it with your creative friends. Doctorow talks about how some of the “common sense” solutions to protect creatives either won’t work or will have horrible backlash on all of us.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

After last year's Enshittification (about the shittiness big companies inflict on us when in a regulatory vacuum), Doctorow narrows the focus on AI. I particularly appreciate this because as a librarian, all I hear all day every day is AI - from hysteria to raptures. Myself, I'm a conscientious objector, although I very much do not want to be a closed-minded Luddite.
Enter this book, which lays out a bunch of reasons why AI itself is not the enemy - it's the financial (and, again) regulatory environment that AI exists in that makes it such an existential topic. The whole narrative around AI coming to steal your jobs and replace you and leave you as part of the permanent underclass - turns out (according to the author, and I don't know enough to doubt him) to be driven by the companies themselves, whose only real motivation for doing ANYTHING is to maintain their status as growth (rather than mature) companies, and thus have easy access to investor capital and printing infinite stock shares. They want us all to believe that their technology is so advanced that its market disruption is inevitable. If Wall Street decided that they were plateauing, their shares would tank and the investors/c-suite would lost all of their accumulated wealth, so the illusion of continued growth is essential.
The title flips the tech term, centaur. A centaur is someone who augments their work with technology, by choice. A reverse-centaur is someone on whom technology is imposed for someone else's bottom line: they are working for the tech, not the tech working for them. The important thing to keep in mind re AI is not what the tech can do (CD is skeptical that it's actually going to replace humans at most tasks) who it is doing it for and to whom it is doing it. He is not an anti-technologist; he is closer to an anti-capitalist and pro-regulator, and above all, doesn't want five mega companies bringing down the entire financial system because they can't function without the illusion of endless growth.
Tldr; billionaires bad, creatives and technology good, our political system should be functioning to use the latter to benefit the most people, not the few. It's concise and convincing - and a good framing to put to anyone who accuses you of being a Luddite if you're AI-skeptical at all.
Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for the arc!

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was full of information and considerations regarding Artificial Intelligence of many kinds. It was not long -- 5.5 hours total -- but managed to hit on vocational awe, copyright, labor strikes, the definition of art, the difference between the AI bubble and AI itself, the costs and benefits of different kinds of AI, the maniacal insanity of our made-up economy systems that allow billionaires to essentially circle-jerk their way into more money while everyone else suffers. (Doctorow didn't explicitly say that last bit, but that's how I interpreted it.)

The concept behind the title was an especially powerful image, and one that was new to me. Good technology allows humans to become centaurs, essentially augmented humans that stand on strong technological legs. In this situation, the human retains their essential humanity and their control over the technology. They can choose how they use the technology, how much, and can stop using it at any time. For people who can use AI in this fashion, they tend to see a lot of opportunities and benefits.

But the reverse centaur is a technology horsehead set upon on spindly, directionless human legs. In that instance, the human has lost both their humanity and their control over the technology, and they are merely helping the technology complete the designated job, usually at an unsustainable pace while being unable to offer human feedback and unable to stop using the technology. For people who are forced to use AI in this kind of arrangement, it feels soul-sucking, and just plain bad.

Many examples of AI disasters and AI successes are used, including the differences between LLM and generative AI versus other kinds (the technological names escape me now), and the differences between cloud-based subscription services that hoover up all your data and are generally wildly expensive, and local models that are both cheaper and offer more privacy.

Doctorow is not anti-AI, nor is he an AI-cheerleader, but he successfully teased out some of the nuance. As a bonus, I frequently cackled at his humor, although some of that humor was genuinely just funny while some of it was more horror-humor and if I didn't laugh I might cry. Regardless, he has a good turn of phrase and a pleasant reading voice.

Thanks to Libro.fm for the ALC.
#Libro.fmAudiobook

[Ava · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enlightened and insightful take on AI

I am anti-AI, full stop, even if the author thinks that’s a silly thing to be. I think in its current form, it’s a threat to public health, human rights, critical thinking, media literacy, the environment, and even our society as we know it.

Cory Doctorow puts forth a much more nuanced take on AI in his book, suggesting criticisms like mine are fueling the hype train that enables tech giants to sell AI and create precisely what I fear. Doctorow instead puts AI in the tech bubble context of growth vs. mature stocks alongside other forced-use technologies like Google+ (yes, I am that old too) and streaming video services’ autoplay recommendations. To him, trillion-dollar companies need to make trillion-dollar bets, and this type of AI is a bet that’s destined to fail.

To Doctorow, a technology is neutral; it’s who it’s used for and who gets to choose that matters. He argues that if AI were device-based and backed by academics or open-source programmers, we’d be having a very different conversation than AI that’s taking up a third of the stock market and posed to destroy the economy and environment for generations to come. He’s got an excellent point that’s well worth reading and absolutely vital to consider, for all of us.

Doctorow is right: we should blame the bosses more than the tool that they say can replace us as workers. We should have the right to use technology if we choose, and the tool should serve us rather than us serving the technology.

Still, I’m not completely convinced. I don’t believe a technology that’s built from scraped data and trained by forcing low-wage workers to sift through the worst horrors humanity can create, running on devices built with minerals mined through child slave labor, sucking up energy and water resources that are already quite scarce, emitting pollution and heat that threaten the environment can possibly be neutral. Even if we run a version of it on our laptop to transcribe podcasts.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trying to sort through the AI hype has been frustrating at times, so I’ve been reading as much as I can to make sure I have the information I need to make informed choices as an educator and consumer. The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence–Before It’s Too Late by Cory Doctorow is an extremely valuable addition to that reading list. What stands out most is how Doctorow explains complex concepts, such as the economics of the current AI bubble and the role copyright plays in LLM training and outputs, in a straightforward, easily comprehensible manner. He also dispels the “AI inevitableism” that has always frustrated me. One of the major themes running through this book is that AI tools are products made by companies that may or may not endure, especially if/when the AI bubble bursts, and that we have the power to influence the direction AI takes. Doctorow offers numerous examples of situations in which AI failed to live up to the hype, while acknowledging areas where AI is actually helpful and not necessarily damaging to the environment. The key, according to Doctorow, is ensuring that we are Centaurs, people who are assisted by AI, and that we retain our autonomy over when and how we use it as opposed to the “Reverse Centaur" who is an assistant to the machine. While I don’t agree with everything in this book (it will take a lot to convince me that AI therapy could ever be a good thing), I think Doctorow’s insight and explanations are extremely valuable, and I recommend this to anyone who wants to learn more about the issues surrounding AI.

Thank you to Libro.fm for an advance listening copy of the audiobook and to NetGalley for an ARC of the ebook. I have to say that I preferred the audiobook because Doctorow narrated it himself. His reading conveyed the tone in a way that did not come across in the printed text.

[Mikala · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cory Doctorow's *The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI* introduces a framework that has genuinely changed how I think about the AI conversation. The central distinction is simple but effective: a "centaur" is someone who chooses when and how to use AI to augment their own abilities, while a "reverse centaur" is someone forced to serve the technology, working at an inhuman pace dictated by a machine. That framing clarifies so much of the current debate. As someone who loves AI and uses it regularly, I finally understand why so many people are not just skeptical but actively resentful. They are not anti-technology. They are being made into reverse centaurs, forced to use tools that may not even be useful for their work, simply because a company decided AI adoption is mandatory.

Doctorow does a strong job breaking down the financial hype cycle driving all of this, from inflated revenue metrics to the circular investment schemes propping up trillion-dollar valuations. He is not anti-AI, which I appreciated. He uses it himself and sees real potential in it. His issue is with the bubble, the inevitability narrative, and the way AI discourse gets weaponized to serve investors rather than actual users. The book reads like a companion piece to his earlier *Enshittification*, and if you liked that one, this covers similar ground with a tighter focus on AI specifically.

My main criticism is that it is shorter than I expected and light on actionable advice for how to actually live and work alongside AI going forward. It is more of a "how to think about this" book than a "what to do about it" book. That said, as a framework for cutting through the noise, it is sharp and worthwhile. Recommended for anyone trying to make sense of where AI is headed, whether you are excited about the technology or exhausted by it.

[Curtis Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Know what you are getting. This is a book trying to dispel the illusion around AI in the current world. The author discusses what it means to be a Centaur (someone who's work is improved/supported/made easier with the use of a technology) as well as what it means to be a Reverse Centaur (someone who is a cog in the wheel of technology and therefore either replaced by/a support of/or work is made less meaningful by technology).

Does it accomplish the objective? Yes, plus much more. Multiple examples of both types of work with AI are represented. He does give a warnings stating roughly, "If your boss is excited about using AI, beware!" He states that the real reason for a lot of the hype around AI is to improve the outlook of the tech companies and make them appear to be growth companies/stock for investors, better financing terms, and for hiring high-quality talent.

He makes a great case for small AI bots/chatbots and against the large hype around LLMs. Is AI going to replace you? Maybe, but then if it does you should expect to be back to work fairly quickly because AI is not good at replacing people. The cost to benefit ratio for an AI versus a competent human weigh heavily for the human.

How does it read? I have the audiobook version, and it almost feels like satire. Multiple times during the first half of the book I was laughing out loud. Not sure if I was laughing because it was funny or because it really hit home. The last 1/3 of the book or so was very serious about the lasting impact that AI will have when the bubble bursts. Doctorow does a great job reading his own book with good pacing at 1.25-1.50x speed. Plenty of inflection without feeling boring, slow, or too dramatic.

Writing: 5/5
Narration: 5/5
Overall: 5/5

[Addison Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought I already knew quite a lot about the AI industry, but Doctorow's new book really opened my eyes to some aspects of the technology and the business that I hadn't yet considered. I was especially interested to learn that the reliance on AI in radiology, besides putting radiologists' jobs at risk, can lead experienced professionals to miss errors due to getting to accustomed to (usually) accurate output from the tech. As someone who doesn't invest, I also hadn't thought the AI bubble would impact me very much, but Doctorow puts forth a case for why it will be better for everyone if the bubble bursts sooner rather than later. To be clear, he is not anti-AI as a concept, and shares his own experiences in which AI tools have helped him to complete tasks more efficiently, but he most definitely comes down against the AI industry as a whole, and skewers the moneyed elite and corporations who are working to inject AI into every facet of our lives for profit.

The online book community, especially on Threads, is extremely opposed to generative AI, but the reasons are often primarily about copyright and the environment. Doctorow does address these issues, but I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a more comprehensive understanding of how AI is being rolled out, by whom, and why.

Regarding the narration, Doctorow did a great job narrating his own work. The content can be quite dense in parts, so I recommend listening at normal speed, or only just a little faster, or else you may have a hard time keeping up.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the opportunity to listen to the ALC and offer my honest feedback!

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Cory Doctorow's "Enshittification" was a book all about explaining why EVERYTHING sucks now, this one feels like a spiritual sequel to explain why AI is taking everything already enshittified and somehow making it way worse.

In The Reverse Centaur, Doctorow breaks down exactly why most of the "magical" applications AI companies are trying to sell everyone won't actually work out for anyone, while warning that this whole thing is absolutely a bubble that will most definitely burst. It's all just hype to please investors and it's completely normal to feel a little insane whenever you hear the "reverse centaurs" in tech sing it's praises for applications it has no business being implemented in.

Basically, this book is a sanity check for anyone who feels like they're slowly going insane with all the AI hype constantly bombarding us from every imaginable angle.

Doctorow and I share a lot of the same feelings about AI: yes it's overhyped, yes, it's terrible for the planet, and yes, many people will unjustly lose their jobs because of it -- but there are also a lot of really cool and exciting things we can do with LLMs that are worth exploring.

While I found Enshittification to be a bit too long and repetitive, this book and much shorter and gets to the point almost immediately. I definitely recommend you check it out, especially if you've got a boss or friends who have drunk a little too much of the AI Kool-Aid and you need something to tell you that you're not crazy for feeling like this tech isn't capable of doing half the "miraculous" things it promises to do.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley for the arc.

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone should read this book! Doctorow doesn’t mince words on the BIG AI companies and what their goals are. “Microsoft and OpenAI aren’t alone in using these accounting gimmicks to create the impression that more investment and revenue are flowing into AI companies. Every AI company is using all kinds of cheap tricks to juke the stats to make AI seem like a bigger phenomenon than it actually is.” He clarifies why and how big AI companies became trillion dollar corporations selling “growth” to its investors rather than AI productivity to its users! “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI…” covers everything from the creative arts, copyright & bubbles to LLMs, robotaxis, Data Centers and Spotify. Doctorow leaves you with hope for the the real AI tools being applied in the struggle for human rights. “HRDAG(Human Rights Data Analysis Group) has found many ways to use AI to improve their work. Take data collection: HRDAG does extensive work on wrongful arrests, police violence, and police abuse in the United States… They use LLMs to help identify sensitive private information about victims and witnesses that agencies failed to redact…” and avoid publishing this as part of their reports.

A master at keeping the reader’s attention and truth telling at its best, Doctorow zones in on what matters in the use of any technological tool!. “The solution to the paradox is to stop thinking about what the gadget does, and pay attention to who the gadget does it to and who the gadget does it for. The important part isn’t the technical characteristics of the device, it’s the power relationships of the people who use the device.”

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cory Doctorow writes with his accustomed wit and humor as he gleefully pulls back the curtain on the Ozian AI hype wave, revealing that that behind all the façade of world changing technological wizardry, there’s really just mundane corporate greed. It’s no different from other bubbles before it, cynical and savvy promoters making a mountain out of a fairly small (for now) technological mole hill to extract profit.

Reading this is akin to having a persistent pain in your foot and finally removing a hidden pebble in your shoe. It’s full of “Ah ha. THAT’S why!” moments. The experience is roughly half receiving what feels like forbidden knowledge and half the relief of finally understanding the reasons behind something deeply annoying and perplexing.

Why auto play videos are now ubiquitous on every platform. Why so much discourse around AI is overblown and intentionally divisive (because that’s what drives engagement and hence perks the interest of investors), why buttons that used to actually do something useful on your phone now prompt a horrendous, useless AI gremlin to cover your screen. These and several other phenomena are explained in Doctorow’s signature scathing style. For all his (well founded) criticism, this book is not a rant. There is nuance and clear eyed analysis here.

As always Doctorow displays his flair for synthesizing complex systems into something comprehensible and entertaining you into the bargain. Proving again, if proof were needed, that he’s one of the most interesting, relevant writers today.

[Lauren D'Souza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone who knows me knows that I hate AI. I avoid it as much as I possibly can, even for menial tasks like asking advice, making recipes, finding book ideas, writing emails, etc. I am a firm believer that overuse of AI is causing our brains to rot and I fear for the kids that grow up as native AI users.

What Doctorow fears - more than the everyday tasks I mentioned above - are the companies who claim that AI is going to lead to payroll savings by entirely replacing jobs that humans currently do. He dreads the creation of a so-called “reverse centaur,” where a human is essentially spot checking work done by the AI and not the other way around. For example, replacing radiologists with AI that can interpret X-rays and having a human radiologist look over the AI diagnosis instead of the AI being a second opinion after the human has first done the diagnosis.

He notes that we shouldn’t entirely fear this happening - it really is a “growth stock” narrative pushed by companies to convince their investors they haven’t reached maturity yet. However, he doesn’t see companies realizing the folly of their ways until it’s too late and we’ve suffered massive workforce impacts.

Doctorow argues in favor of AI enabling us to be centaurs - being a tool that makes humans more efficient and better at our jobs, simply another tool in the toolbox we have at work that can take away tasks that consume too much of our time. Not only are these tasks less impactful on resources, but they are enough to unlock productivity gains that sell themselves, as opposed to the massive and complex AI systems that are resource intensive and way less efficacious than we think they’ll be. Ultimately, his argument acknowledges that there will be messy and expensive fallout from this AI bubble, which is disheartening. But I’m on board with his notion that we can use AI like a tool and not to entirely replace human jobs - I just hope the people who need to hear this will hear it.

[Stuart Rosen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author Doctorow states his premise early in the book - Artificial Intelligence is a vehicle to maintain tech companies' status as "growth companies," so the technology is hyped, over-promising, under-delivering, and maybe a complete and utter fraud.

In support of that premise, Doctorow cites any number of examples of AI platforms and apps and services that are just hyped enough to persuade employers to lay off humans in exchange for adopting technology that fails to do its job as well as the fired humans.

It's all pretty convincing, and definitely entertaining. However, Doctorow then cites any number of examples of individual uses of AI that DO benefit individuals. The problem, according to Doctorow, is not so much, it seems, that AI doesn't exist; it's that its value all depends on whose hands are on the wheel. There's a contradiction between both parts of Doctorow's argument that he doesn't really come to terms with.

I don't think you have to dismiss Doctorow's thoughts to conclude that it's not all that simple. AI can be incredibly useful, while also posing a threat. My own sense - admittedly, less educated and less knowledgeable than Doctorow's - is that AI is real, and its value to humanity will depend on what we teach the AI systems to learn.

All of which is to say that I thoroughly enjoyed Doctorow's take, even if I didn't buy everything he was offering.

Many thanks to Farrar, Straus & Giroux and NetGalley for the advance reviewer's copy.

[Emma Cathryne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to describe this as anything other than an absolute slam dunk by Cory Doctorow. Nonfiction from science fiction authors always hits different -- I'm rapidly learning nonfiction from anticapitalist leftist science fiction authors is in a whole other class. Doctrow's treatise on AI is cleverly named for the machine learning concept of the reverse centaur --an extended metaphor used here to describe the subordination of large groups of people to an energy-and-money sucking machine that serves little (if any) benefit to society.

If you, like me, have experienced the vague sentiment that all this AI stuff seems too good to be true and its potential benefits have already been overshadowed by the twin evils of capitalism of a facist surveillance state - this book is for you! If you haven't had these thoughts, but just generally want to get a picture of the AI landscape not biased by people who want your money or have poured all of THEIR money into making AI succeed - this book is also for you! I've noticed that a lot of AI-critical writers fall prey to fear-mongering and/or sweeping generalizations that limit the impact of their (often valid) core points. Doctrow dodges these pitfalls and strikes a balance of dry humor, frank words of warning, and ultimately cautious optimism that left me feeling both angry and energized. Catch me assigning sections of this to my undergraduates next semester after it hits the bookshelves later this summer.

[Lorena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an entertaining and informative listen. If you’ve enjoyed any of Cory Doctorow’s previous nonfiction, you’ll likely enjoy this. If you’re not familiar with his nonfiction, then this is a fine place to start. As the subtitle suggests, this is a good guide on how to think about artificial intelligence (AI). It didn’t really give me any ideas on what to do about it, but it didn’t promise that. At least I feel more confident in how to consider the issues now.

Doctorow is an experienced journalist who does a great job making technical issues understandable for a general audience. I think he offers a balanced analysis; he shares some ways in which AI can be helpful, as well as discussing many things that it’s not good at. He talks about the evils of late-stage capitalism, and so much of what shares infuriated me, but he also maintains a sense of humor about it.

The audiobook production was good, as was the narration by the author. He’s a good public speaker, so I enjoyed hearing him share his thoughts in his own warm, friendly voice.

Thanks to Macmillan Audio for providing me with a free advanced review copy of the audiobook through NetGalley. I volunteered to provide an honest review.

[Jesper · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always enjoy listening to Cory Doctorow rant about technology and society and all the problems with them, and this book about the current AI bubble was no exception. The fact that most of the content wasn't really new information to me or that some of the arguments rely more on anecdotes and colorful analogies than detailed data does not really detract from that enjoyment, but it does make me a bit wary to not take some of the conclusions too seriously. Don't misunderstand me: I absolutely agree with the many harms caused by AI that this book talks about, but I'm not as eager as Doctorow to dismiss some of the claims about the capabilities of AI models (and the subsequent dangers of those) yet.

One thing that listening to this book did make me change my mind on is on the AI copyright question. Doctorow makes a pretty convincing argument that the way AI models are built does not meaningfully rely on copyright violations, and that making copyright law stricter to prevent training AI models would cause much more harm than good. There are more than enough other reasons to oppose continued AI rollouts that have more solid backing than copyright.

Now, let's see how much longer we can keep inflating this balloon before it pops.

[Joel]

Enjoyed this, and I think I'd read his previous book too, based on this. It felt a bit hastily written (it did apparently have its genesis in blog posts) but also appropriately lively and pointed given the expediency of its subject matter.

I was especially surprised by his insistence that copyright is not actually the main problem with how AI uses people's creative work, and that analyzing and "counting" things in an existing work to train an LLM is not illegal nor even morally problematic, even if the purpose is to create code that may ultimately be used to generate a product that is in some way related to the work used to train the model. I wasn't super satisfied with the very short chapter on how what creative people need to worry about rather than copyright is their ability to unionize. Even if he's right, I'm still left with a sinking feeling of despair that all human-made cultural products are capturable and can be legally used to train LLMs and thus in some way influence their output, and that apparently many people do not see this is a problem -- even people who are avowedly critical of AI and AI hype, as Doctorow is.

I'm trying to write a book about this stuff right now, and this has given me a lot to think about!

[Stav · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this upcoming release, Doctorow does what he does best: he takes a tired tech metaphor and flips it on its head. While the traditional "AI Centaur" promised a future where humans provide the strategy and AI provides the horsepower, Doctorow warns of the Reverse Centaur. This is the grim reality where the algorithm makes the decisions and the human becomes a mere biological appendage tasked with carrying out the physical labor.

It is a natural evolution of his "Enshittification" thesis, and his prose is as sharp and high signal as ever. He has a gift for connecting the dots between labor rights, code, and corporate overreach in a way that feels both urgent and inevitable.

However, one has to account for the classic Doctorow bias. He is so deeply invested in his anti-monopoly narrative that he often ignores the nuanced, positive applications of these technologies. For him, AI is almost exclusively a tool for surveillance and exploitation. It is a brilliant, necessary read, but don't expect a balanced view of the tech itself. He is a man on a mission, and that mission occasionally blinds him to the utility of the tools he critiques.