Cory Doctorow, the writer who popularized the term 'enshittification' to describe how digital platforms degrade their own services after capturing users, has published a new work examining the consequences of artificial intelligence. Titled The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, the book introduces a concept inverts traditional automation theory. While a 'centaur' describes a human augmented by technology, Doctorow's 'reverse centaur' designates a person conscripted into serving a machine: warehouse laborers unable to meet algorithmic fulfillment quotas, autonomous vehicle monitors earning subsistence wages, or professionals reduced to validating AI outputs rather than applying their own expertise. This, Doctorow contends, represents the true promise of AI: not augmentation but subordination.
The architects of AI have offered stark visions of its trajectory. Elon Musk has declared it the single greatest threat to civilization; Sam Altman has speculated it will 'most likely lead to the end of the world.' Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei memorably suggested AI might regard humanity the way we regard animals: endearing but ultimately a resource. Doctorow finds such grandiose projections unfounded. Describing AI as fundamentally a 'conjuring trick,' he argues the technology excels at statistical word prediction, and we erroneously impute intentionality to a system that intends nothing. The term 'hallucination,' he contends, reveals more about human psychology than machine cognition. Those convinced AI might achieve consciousness, he suggests, have simply forgotten what consciousness actually entails.
Yet Doctorow identifies genuine peril in more conventional forms. AI investment has ballooned from $700 billion to $1.4 trillion, on course for $2.4 trillion. Nine American technology firms now constitute 35 percent of total US stock market valuation, a concentration that insulated American markets when geopolitical instability affected European and Asian exchanges. The inevitable reckoning, Doctorow argues, follows Stein's Law: anything unsustainable eventually ceases. Whether markets obey Keynes's competing observation that irrationality can persist longer than solvency remains uncertain. What is certain, he insists, is that bubbles eventually burst. 'You cannot make billions without hurting people,' Doctorow observes. At 54, split between Los Angeles and London, Doctorow brings credentials from co-founding the peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, editing the influential blog Boing Boing, and holding academic positions at Cornell and the Open University, where he received an honorary doctorate in computer science.