Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI 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 labour: 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.

A provocative guide to what’s good, bad, and (profoundly) stupid about AI, by the bestselling author of Enshittification.

About the Author: CORY DOCTOROW is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of many books. He writes nonfiction policy books such as The Internet Con and Chokepoint Capitalism, as well as science fiction for adults – Red Team Blues and The Lost Cause – and for young adults – Little Brother. He has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and has been honored with the Arthur C. Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Award and the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. He was made an honorary Doctor of Laws by York University and an Honorary Doctor of Com-puter Science by the Open University. For a quarter century, he has been an activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He co-founded the UK Open Rights Group and holds visiting appointments at the Open University, MIT, Cornell, and the University of North Carolina. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Burbank, California.

23 Jun 2026
 

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late by Cory Doctorow ISBN 9781836745884