Reviewed by Clare Brook
In our brave new high tech world things are rarely what they seem to be. In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI – How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late Cory Doctorow sorts the reality from the hype.
Doctorow’s title is adapted from automation theory: a centaur is a person using a machine to enhance their performance. Examples being as mundane as using a computer, spell check, research using a search engine or driving a car. But less helpful, in fact damaging, is the reverse centaur position when a human is directed by a machine. Doctorow uses the example of an Amazon warehouse worker who is forced to work at impossible speed that does not even allow for bathroom breaks. And, higher up the pay grade, radiologists demoted to checking AI analysis rather than using AI to enhance their judgement. When analysing the advantages or harms that AI generates the focal question revolves around whether it is enhancing human performance or controlling it.
Doctorow enlightens his readers regarding the problem of tech companies’ price-to-sales ratios based on future growth and also the fact that the net worth of a tech industry is in stock value, not real profits. So investors must be constantly sold the potential of AI’s future growth. All the hype is really aimed at investors in order to feed the investment bubble. And problematically, tech companies represent one third of America’s stock market value. When the bubble bursts it will cause catastrophic damage to the economy.
In subsequent chapters Doctorow discusses effects of AI on creative industries, and educational institutions. Perhaps most alarming are the enormous data centres that power AI, while churning through power and water at great cost to the environment, with no commensurate gain to civilisation. There is, he thinks, some useful aspects of AI that will be left after the ‘bubble’ bursts. Nevertheless, we are all going to pay a very high price for those assets.
It is made clear by Doctorow that it is not AI technology that is the problem, rather those who are recklessly driving the hype for their own gain. And at great cost to every creature on this planet. And we all know who they are!
Highly Highly Recommended.
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI – How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late
by Cory Doctorow
(2026)
Bloomsbury
Paperback
ISBN: 978 1 8367 4588 4
$31.49; 240pp