![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/ReverseCentaurBookCover.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe Reverse Centaur\u2019s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence \u2014 Before It\u2019s Too Late
\nCory Doctorow
\nFarrar, Straus & Giroux (2026)<\/p>\n
In tech-bro dialect, a centaur is a human assisted by a machine, such a motorist or a user of hearing aids. <\/p>\n
\u201cA reverse centaur,\u201d Cory Doctorow tells us, \u201cis a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine,\u201d like users of social media providing themselves as targets for advertisers.<\/p>\n
In his latest book, the Toronto-born science fiction author and tech critic argues that artificial intelligence will make us all reverse centaurs, or assistants to machines, if it succeeds.<\/p>\n
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He consoles us with a promise that AI is a classic investment bubble and will soon pop. It\u2019s an argument that makes me oddly cheerful about the prospect of global economic collapse.<\/p>\n
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Cory Doctorow\u2019s new book invites readers to see through the hype surrounding AI and critically engage with its real story.<\/p>\n
\u2018If you\u2019re not at the table, you\u2019re on the menu\u2019<\/p>\n
In judging technology, Doctorow writes, \u201cStop thinking about what the gadget does, and pay attention to who the gadget does it to and who the gadget does it for.\u201d <\/p>\n
If the gadget does something to you, to benefit its inventor, or advertisers, or the police, or scammers, you\u2019re on the wrong end of a power relationship. As Prime Minister Mark Carney famously observed, \u201cIf you\u2019re not at the table, you\u2019re on the menu<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n The marketing of AI in the past few years, especially since the release of ChatGPT in 2020, has been awe-inspiring. It has many of us worried that AI will take our jobs, and possibly destroy the world when it improves itself into godlike power. <\/p>\n This marketing, Doctorow says, isn\u2019t aimed at us; it\u2019s aimed at investors.<\/p>\n That\u2019s because investors want to put their money into a growing corporation whose greatest profits are in the future. When a corporation stops growing, Doctorow explains, it\u2019s considered \u201cmature,\u201d ticking along but unlikely to deliver a hot new product or service that will generate a surge in profits. <\/p>\n \u201cOnce a company stops growing,\u201d he says, \u201cit becomes vastly overvalued, because it is now a mature company.\u201d<\/p>\n Grow or die<\/p>\n This is especially true of the tech sector. Even a multitrillion-dollar corporation like Apple still wants to be seen as growing, always on the verge of attracting a tsunami of money thanks to some new gadget or indispensable app.<\/p>\n No such gadget or app will be built in anybody\u2019s garage. It will take hundreds of millions of dollars just to construct the global supply chains for such gadgets, and the tech corporations are competing against one another for investments. <\/p>\n Very early on, the AI companies knew they needed to make investors, governments and consumers all believe that a race was on \u2014 not just between companies, but between nations like the U.S. and China, to produce ever better versions of the technology. <\/p>\n The logic went something like this: if Apple faltered, OpenAI would rule. If the U.S. didn\u2019t commit to AI, China\u2019s versions would conquer the world. Those who invested in the winner would enjoy enormous wealth.<\/p>\n
To strengthen this belief, tech companies adopted a marketing strategy for AI that Doctorow calls \u201cinevitabilism,\u201d which he describes as \u201cthe insistence that there is only one conceivable way to do things, and any problems you\u2019re experiencing aren\u2019t anyone\u2019s fault, they\u2019re just inescapable reality.\u201d <\/p>\n He cites the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who famously sold neoliberal economics by saying, without evidence, \u201cThere is no alternative<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n But Doctorow insists we must have choices. And we can\u2019t simply accept the billionaires\u2019 decisions for using AI. <\/p>\n \u201cThe boss who tells you the only way to use a cash register is to fire your coworkers and make you do their jobs, too, is practising vulgar Thatcherism,\u201d he writes. <\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re trying to bamboozle you with inevitabilism.\u201d<\/p>\n On the growth of AI, we are in a bubble, Cory Doctorow insists, and it\u2019s going to pop soon. Doctorow sees \u201cthe bosses,\u201d the managerial classes, as a major market for AI. The bosses are united in their dislike of having to hire workers, and therefore excited by the prospect of replacing them with AI. <\/p>\n Even those who remain become reverse centaurs, mere proofreaders of AI-generated code. He uses the example of Amazon\u2019s coders, who once enjoyed high salaries and endless perks. <\/p>\n They \u201care now being worked like Amazon\u2019s warehouse workers and delivery drivers, among the most abused workforce in the wealthy world,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n Two-thirds of a trillion dollars<\/p>\n We are in a bubble, Doctorow insists, and it\u2019s going to pop soon. \u201cBeing a growth company is awfully nice,\u201d he writes. \u201cBut it\u2019s also awfully precarious.\u201d <\/p>\n He cites the case of Nvidia, which lost $600 billion in one day in 2025 after China released DeepSeek \u2014 an AI-powered chatbot vastly cheaper than American models. As the maker of expensive high-end chips used by AI companies, Nvidia saw its stock lose, as Doctorow describes it, \u201ctwo! thirds! of! one! trillion! dollars!\u201d<\/p>\n The company eventually recovered, but Doctorow warns that \u201cthe higher a company flies, the more likely it is that if it stalls out, it will never recover from its tailspin, because the more a company is growing, the higher its P\/E [price to earnings] ratio will be and the more its stock will drop once it is perceived as \u2018mature.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n So much money, but few profits<\/p>\n AI builds itself by scanning millions of words to find statistically likely answers to our questions. Increasingly, Doctorow notes, those words are themselves AI-generated, and therefore more likely to be wrong. <\/p>\n As computer scientists pointed out in the days of room-sized computers running on vacuum tubes, \u201cGarbage in, garbage out.\u201d <\/p>\n <\/a> <\/p>\n \u2018The Internet Sucks.\u2019 Cory Doctorow Tells How to Fix It<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tread more <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Doctorow points out that so much money is going into AI and data centres that the companies involved simply can\u2019t make a profit, ever. <\/p>\n No matter how many high-salary jobs AI replaces, it won\u2019t bring in enough to cover the investment in AI, let alone make a profit. <\/p>\n The newly unemployed may well use AI to design their r\u00e9sum\u00e9s, but that won\u2019t be a major revenue source either.<\/p>\n An old union joke comes to mind.<\/p>\n Henry Ford shows Walter Reuther, then the head of the United Auto Workers, a new robot working on the assembly line. <\/p>\n Ford asks: \u201cHow are you going to get the robot to take out a union card, Walter?\u201d <\/p>\n Reuther replies: \u201cHow are you going to get the robot to buy a car, Henry?\u201d<\/p>\n Consistent underperformance<\/p>\n \u201cWhere AI is deployed in commercial settings,\u201d Doctorow writes, \u201cit consistently underperforms expectations. During the drafting of this book, an MIT study found that 95 per cent of commercial AI deployments fail with \u2018no measurable impact on profit.\u2019 The news sparked a panicked sell-off of AI-related stocks.\u201d <\/p>\n <\/a> <\/p>\n Many investors know they\u2019re in a bubble, he suggests, and they hang on in hopes of selling out at the top of a doomed market.<\/p>\n \u201cRemember,\u201d Doctorow warns, \u201cseven giant AI companies account for 35 per cent of the U.S. stock market. Amputating 35 per cent of the market is going to destroy a ton of innocent bystanders, including people whose retirement savings are invested in index funds considered the safest of all safe bets. We\u2019re talking about a crash that will put 2008 in the shade and meet or exceed the pandemic sell-off.\u201d<\/p>\n Doctorow\u2019s arguments are persuasive and oddly cheering. <\/p>\n We will be rescued from the AI apocalypse by the collapse of AI and the global economy. <\/p>\n Our pension funds may be lost in the rubble, but the oligarchs and their purchased politicians will face a crisis far worse than, say, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. <\/p>\n Their credibility and power will evaporate with their wealth. <\/p>\n Their data centres will go dark, or never be built at all. <\/p>\n The bright side of collapse<\/p>\n Implicit in such a collapse is a sharp reduction in the use of fossil fuels. Jobless workers will not holiday in France or Bali in the foreseeable future. <\/p>\n Pipeline projects will stall because demand for petroleum will fall. <\/p>\n Governments will welcome renewable energy simply because it\u2019s cheaper. <\/p>\n Life will not always be pleasant, but it will be far better than the subjugation and surveillance the oligarchs dream of.<\/p>\n <\/a> <\/p>\n Is the New AI Chatbot the End of the World as We Know It? <\/p>\n
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\nPhoto by Jonathan Worth<\/a>, Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"image](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/CoryDoctorow__square_thumb.jpg\")
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