Cory Doctorow, the writer who coined the term 'enshittification,' has a new book about AI called The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. In automation theory, a 'centaur' is a person helped by a machine. A reverse centaur is the opposite: a human forced to work as an assistant to a machine. Warehouse workers who cannot use the bathroom because their algorithm-set targets are too demanding are reverse centaurs. So are truckers who sit in self-driving vehicles to monitor them, or lawyers checking the work of AI systems instead of doing legal research themselves. The promise of AI, Doctorow argues, is that it will take everyone's jobs, and resistance is pointless.
Tech leaders have made dramatic predictions about AI. Elon Musk calls it civilization's greatest threat. Sam Altman suggests it might end the world. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says AI might see humans the way we see animals: useful but ultimately exploitable. Doctorow dismisses these claims. 'AI people claim they're about to create God by teaching words to a word-guessing programme,' he says. He argues AI is essentially good at predicting the next word, and we mistakenly attribute meaning and intention to it. When AI makes errors, we call them 'hallucinations,' but this says more about us than the machine.
Despite dismissing AI's existential threats, Doctorow sees real dangers in old-fashioned ways. The AI investment bubble has grown from $700 billion to $1.4 trillion, heading toward $2.4 trillion. Nine US tech companies now represent 35 percent of America's entire stock market. This concentration creates vulnerability. 'We have a quarter of a century's experience with popped bubbles,' Doctorow notes. He quotes two laws of finance: Stein's Law, that anything unsustainable will eventually stop, and Keynes's observation that markets can remain irrational longer than investors can stay solvent. The bubble will burst; only the timing is uncertain.