THE REVERSE CENTAUR’S GUIDE TO LIFE AFTER AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence — Before It’s Too Late, by Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow has produced, by his own estimate, over 30 books. Whenever you pick up a Doctorow, there is a real question: Is this going to be a thrilling polemic like, say, “Enshittification,” which is essential reading if you want to understand why Amazon and Yelp recommendations have rotted into uselessness? Or will it be like one of the other Doctorows that sank beneath the waves never to be seen again?
In a sense, Doctorow has to be prolific. He writes about the effects of technology in a period when technology runs ahead so fast that only writing at breakneck speed can hope to keep up. I, for one, am grateful. To me, he resembles the great rock critics of an earlier era, a high-tech Greil Marcus or even a Lester Bangs. He possesses a useful combination of real knowledge and close observation.
In “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI,” Doctorow takes aim at artificial intelligence with a clever image: the head of a horse on the body of a man. A centaur, in automation theory, is a human assisted by a machine. In Doctorow’s coinage, a “reverse centaur” is “a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine.” The idea is to propose a simple division, between humane and inhumane uses of artificial intelligence, based on which head is on top.
A.I. is a much thornier subject than any other technology that Doctorow has tackled. Its workings and effects are more mysterious, and it is already overgrown with tangled vines of hype and hysteria. Doctorow is at his best in the space in between snark and real insight. Unfortunately, A.I. is not particularly amenable to that kind of treatment.
He is superb, as expected, on the anatomy of Silicon Valley rhetoric and self-aggrandizement, on how much humanity has endangered itself to preserve tech companies’ high price-to-earnings ratios, and on “the Byzantine premium” that “investors place on an asset that they don’t understand.” He also makes one of the most convincing arguments I have read about what will happen when the A.I. bubble pops. “No matter how much you hate A.I., this will not be a good day,” he writes. “Remember: Seven giant A.I. companies account for 35 percent of the U.S. stock market.”
But his instinct toward humanism, admirable as it is, can lead to oversimplified generalizations about the technology itself. “Practically everyone who falls for the A.I. hype is dreaming of getting a human need fulfilled without having to extend moral consideration,” he writes. “That’s as true of the A.I. girlfriend weirdos as it is of the bosses hoping to use A.I. to replace half their workers and terrorize the remainder.” I’m not sure you can call them “A.I. girlfriend weirdos” when, by some estimates, one in five young adults in America have engaged romantically with A.I.
A.I. is also so new that it demands very un-Doctorow-like equivocations. “I won’t rule out the possibility that, in 10 years, I’ll look back at this moment and say, ‘I can’t believe I used to think that A.I. prompts couldn’t yield good art’ (I also won’t rule out the possibility that, in 10 years, we’ll all look back at this moment and say, ‘I can’t believe we ever thought that A.I. art could be any good, ever’).” This is entirely accurate. It’s also not super useful.
His principal plan for preserving human expression in the onslaught of A.I. is to imitate the Hollywood writers who went on strike over A.I. in 2023. It feels oddly antiquated coming from one of the most forward-looking writers alive: There’s power in a union.
Still, Doctorow holds technology up to a standard that has otherwise been forgotten: that it should contain the potential for human liberation, in an anarchic spirit of barriers tumbling. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how relevant that vision remains at this point, especially given the drastic change that artificial intelligence represents.
Like the earlier rock critics — holding onto the original spirit of rock ’n’ roll as money and celebrity and drugs swallowed the business whole — Doctorow tries to preserve the nub of technology’s original promise. In 2026, it’s a refreshingly unusual concept. I just wish it felt more like a vision of possible futures than a nostalgia trip.
THE REVERSE CENTAUR’S GUIDE TO LIFE AFTER AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence — Before It’s Too Late | By Cory Doctorow | MCDxFSG | 225 pp. | Paperback, $18
