Review: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI

I blazed through The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. It’s not too hard, as the audiobook is only 5 hours long, but it was also incredibly engaging and I didn’t want to stop listening. I first found Cory Doctorow through his fiction which was what convinced me to try ebooks. His books were available under a creative commons license for free from his own website so it was risk-free. Since then I’ve continued to read both his fiction and non-fiction books.

If you’re not into science fiction or in the tech space, you’ve probably most recently come across Doctorow from his coining of the term Enshittification in his non-fiction book of the same name. It describes why current economic incentives lead to Internet services degrading over time. Doctorow brings the same analysis to the current AI hype in Reverse Centaur.

There are two key points that Doctorow makes about the AI situation in 2025 (when the book was written, but still applicable today). First, your view on AI depends on whether you are using AI (you are a centaur) or AI is using you (reverse centaur). Second, the AI hype mostly exists so that “old” tech companies can pretend they are still growth companies.

When it comes to the centaur/reverse centaur situation - this is not a new phenomenon, but AI is accelerating things. Essentially, it comes down to whether you have autonomy and creativity in your job or not. For instance, if you are a programmer who gets to choose when and how to use AI in the scope of your work, you will probably find it quite pleasant. It makes you a more effective programmer in the same way that an IDE makes you more effective by doing the programmer’s equivalent of spell check. But if your job is to validate what the AI is doing or to provide a human body to do what AI cannot - then the situation is immiserating and, perhaps even humiliating. The company wants to be able to fire you, but cannot because AI cannot deliver the package to your front porch.

The most important thing about the prior paragraph and that Doctorow points out throughout the book is that, like almost any other technology, AI is value-neutral. It is neither amazing nor horrible that it exists. What is good or bad is how it is used.

As for the growth company section of the book, it finally caused late stage capitalism to make sense to me. For the past few years I’ve been baffled at the fact that companies have to constantly be growing. I know more money is better than the same amount of money, especially if you have shareholders, but it still didn’t make sense to me to see companies exiting markets where they were MAKING A PROFIT, but not growing. I thought it was just a property of late stage capitalism to make everyone “stupid” when it comes to money because of greed. But this was almost too simplistically moralistic of me. What Doctorow explains is that a company that is seen as growing is valued more highly (higher stock price) than another company that is seen as mature. Stock price affects how much compensation they can give the C Suite and how much they can borrow from the bank. It also affects how much money they can magic out of thin air by creating more stock. (Within SOME limits) This is why Google is not content to own “all” search or be part of the mobile phone duopoly. This is why Facebook put so much money into the failed Metaverse. Once Doctorow explained this, the last 5 years of tech suddenly made sense!

What Doctorow does perfectly in this book is to take those two key points and thread them throughout all the examples he gives. He uses them to show why Google is so insistent on pushing AI onto us in Gmail and Google Docs. He uses it to explain the over-inflated AI claims. Suddenly the world makes so much more sense.

This is one of those books that I seriously recommend EVERYONE should read. Doctorow does a good job creating relatable examples and explaining the technology to a lay person. (I admit I’m not the perfect judge of this, but to my mind he didn’t just assume the reader knew about what I considered to be basic tech) AI hype is touching all of us and so I think you should share this book with everyone you know - whether they are a techie or not. As I said earlier, Doctorow is neither a booster nor a doomer. He talks about the bad - AI snake oil salesmen, data centers chugging our water and power, worse medical outcomes. He talks about the good - how it has helped him in his writing, how a non-profit he works with uses it to check government compliance, and so on. ESPECIALLY share it with your creative friends. Doctorow talks about how some of the “common sense” solutions to protect creatives either won’t work or will have horrible backlash on all of us.

• AI