Cory Doctorow is a writer. He made a new word. The word is enshittification. He has a new book. The book is about AI. The title is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. In automation, a centaur is a person with a machine. The machine helps the person. A reverse centaur is different. It is a human who helps a machine. This is bad. Warehouse workers are reverse centaurs. They cannot use the bathroom. Their work targets come from an algorithm. The targets are too high. Truckers sit in self-driving trucks. They watch the trucks. This is also reverse centaur work. Lawyers check AI work. They do not do real legal research. This is reverse centaur work too. Doctorow says AI will take all jobs. He says resistance is useless.
Tech leaders say big things about AI. Elon Musk calls AI the biggest danger to civilization. Sam Altman says AI might end the world. Dario Amodei runs Anthropic. He says AI might see humans like we see animals. Humans are useful but not important. Doctorow does not believe these ideas. He says AI people claim they will make God. They teach words to a word-guessing program. This is not real. Doctorow says AI is good at one thing. It predicts the next word. We think AI has meaning and purpose. This is a mistake. When AI makes errors, we call them hallucinations. This tells us more about ourselves than about the machine.
The investment bubble in AI keeps growing. It went from seven hundred billion dollars to one point four trillion dollars. It might reach two point four trillion dollars. Nine US tech companies now hold thirty-five percent of Americas whole stock market. This creates danger. Doctorow has seen bubbles before. He says unsustainable things will stop. This is Steins Law. Keynes said markets can stay irrational longer than investors can stay solvent. The bubble will burst. No one knows when.