The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think about Artificial Intelligence--Before It's Too Late

The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think about Artificial Intelligence--Before It's Too Late - Paperback

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The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think about Artificial Intelligence--Before It's Too Late
  • The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think about Artificial Intelligence--Before It's Too Late
The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think about Artificial Intelligence--Before It's Too Late - Paperback

The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think about Artificial Intelligence--Before It's Too Late - Paperback

by Cory Doctorow
$18.00
$18.00

Book Overview

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
National Indie Bestseller

"[Doctorow] resembles the great rock critics of an earlier era, a high-tech Greil Marcus or even a Lester Bangs." --Stephen Marche, The New York Times Book Review

A short, provocative guide to what's good, bad, and stupid about AI and the discourse around AI, by the author of Enshittification.

In modern tech parlance, a centaur is a person who is able to use technology to be a better, more productive version of themself. A reverse centaur is a person who is forced by technology to work at an inhuman pace--a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code.

The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI is not another anti-AI screed. Cory Doctorow uses AI in his work every day. As a creative person, he has no moral or dogmatic issue with AI--he thinks the technology is useful, even exciting, and full of potential. And yet.

AI has arrived surrounded by unprecedented hype driven by a tech industry desperate to maintain its unprecedented valuation based on its own promises of endless financial growth. Despite the fact that almost all of AI's real-world implementations have proved underwhelming, AI is projected to be worth more than $16 trillion--a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of "value," every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI.

For Doctorow, it is imperative to see through that hype to the real story, to understand the technology not just for what it does, but for who it does it to and who it does it for. From that point of view, the story of AI is indeed dramatic and unprecedented, having generated an investment bubble so big that it endangers the entire world economy. In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI--as he so successfully did in Enshittification--Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life "after" AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around.
ISBN9780374621568
Author Cory Doctorow
PublisherMCD
GenreBusiness and Technology
FormatPaperback
PublishedJune 2026
LanguageENG- English
Pages240
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Business & Economics Computers Nonfiction Technology & Engineering

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More by Cory Doctorow

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do about It

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do about It - Hardcover

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do about It - Hardcover

By Cory Doctorow

About Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is a Canadian, British, American blogger, journalist, and activist. For more than twenty-three years, he has worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on campaigns to further and safeguard our human rights online. He was coeditor of the weblog Boing Boing for nineteen years and now maintains a daily(ish) newsletter at Pluralistic.net. He has written more than thirty books, including nonfiction books like this one, many science fiction novels, collections of short stories and essays, young adult novels, graphic novels, and even a picture book. Born in Toronto, he now lives in Burbank, California. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws by York University and an Honorary Doctor of Computer Science from the Open University. He has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and was awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society. He holds visiting professorship and research appointments at MIT, the University of North Carolina, Cornell University, and the Open University,

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