The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late
- Author: Cory Doctorow
- Page count: 241
- Started on: 2026/06/18
- Finished on: 2026/06/21
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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I’ve been reading Cory Doctorow’s books since 2017, when a friend recommended Little Brother. Little Brother was indeed right up my alley, so I’ve been reading many of Cory’s works since, often through his Kickstarter campaigns. Since 2022 he’s written a string of non-fiction books about big tech, including what happens when a few players control both supply and demand in a market (Enshittification), and now about dealing with the impact of AI.
Cory also writes a daily blog on pluralistic.net (recommended), which is where I first encountered the reverse centaur metaphor used in this book’s ridiculously long title: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late12.
In Cory’s AI metaphor, a centaur (a human head on a horse body) is when a human uses AI (these days, in this context, that’s mostly LLMs) to do some of the more boring or mundane stuff in their life. A reverse centaur, then, is when you let the AI do the driving, and a human only does the things that the AI can’t do. This leads to a horribly dystopian world, exemplified by micro-managed Amazon delivery drivers and call-center employees, and lots of tech workers being laid off because their bosses think their jobs can be done by AI.
Since I read Cory’s blog about 30% of the time, the themes and even the wording in the Reverse Centaur’s Guide were very familiar, but it was (as always) good to read it in a more condensed and better edited format. My main criticism of Cory’s recent non-fiction works has been that it’s heavy on warnings and problem diagnosis, but seldom offers concrete solutions for those problems. As the title suggests, this book does offer more solutions and has a section on what we can do with the leftovers once the AI bubble bursts, but it’s still more limited than I’d like. I found the book a good, entertaining overview of the current state in the AI landscape/bubble, how we got here, the motivations of the main players, and some high-level likely outcomes in the coming years. I doubt it’ll be the last Doctorow writes on this topic, and I’m here to read future installments.
