How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

Cory Doctorow has a problem. He's sick of talking about AI, so he wrote a book explaining why we should stop obsessing over it. Now he has to talk about it even more.

According to Ars Technica, his new book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI follows up on his enshittification thesis with a sharper target: the power dynamics behind AI deployment, not the technology itself. Doctorow argues we're asking the wrong questions when we endlessly debate what AI can or can't do.

His central concept cuts through the hype. A centaur is a human augmented by technology, using tools to get better outcomes. A reverse centaur is a human reduced to a meat peripheral for an algorithmic system. Think Amazon delivery drivers surrounded by AI cameras monitoring every move, their bodies serving the van's optimization logic rather than the other way around.

This framing matters because it shifts the conversation from capability to control. The question isn't whether AI is smart enough to replace jobs. It's who decides how these systems get deployed, who profits from them, and whether workers have any say in becoming reverse centaurs. Doctorow wants us to strike at the roots: the concentration of power that lets companies treat humans as expendable components.

The timing is pointed. As AI tools proliferate across every industry, the reverse centaur dynamic is spreading from warehouses to creative work, customer service to coding. The systems don't have to be intelligent to reshape labor relations. They just need to monitor, measure, and squeeze.

What this means for you: before adopting any AI workflow, ask who it's really augmenting. If you're spending more time feeding the system than it's saving you, you might be the peripheral. Try this prompt with your AI assistant: 'Review my current AI tool usage and identify where I'm spending more time managing the tool than the tool is saving me. Suggest one workflow I should automate fully or abandon entirely.'