Cory Doctorow writes a lot of science fiction but is best known for his recent and very popular book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It in which he argues that the Big Tech companies like Facebook and Google have ruined the internet by deliberately reducing the quality of their services in order to increase profits. For example, Google intentionally worsened the performance of its search engines knowing that if you don’t find what you need, then you have to search again…enabling Google to show you a second round of ads and thereby make even more money. By establishing monopolies and buying off government regulation, these giants can get away with privacy violations and all sorts of predations.

This post is about Doctorow’s new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think about Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late, which takes similar snarky aim at Big AI companies (some of which were Doctorow’s targets in Enshittification). Though “reverse centaur,” unlike “enshittification,” is unlikely to be named “word of the year,” it’s a little catchy. Says Doctorow: “In automation theory (the academic study of automation), a centaur is a person who is assisted by a machine.” On the other hand, “[a] reverse centaur is a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine.”

Much of this new book is devoted to how workers are being increasingly exploited and abused by firms that use AI to turn them into reverse centaurs. Doctorow says he’s loves the automation system in his car that warns him when he is drifting out of his lane. He is a centaur…he can turn that feature off whenever he desires. Contrast that, he says, with the driver of an Amazon delivery van who is most decidedly a reverse centaur in that the driver must “sign into at least nine separate apps, and [is] continuously scored based on their driving performance, as assessed by various AI tools.” Obviously, using AI to turn workers into robots’ assistants raises a raft of ethical issues, but that is not the focus of this post.

Doctorow spends a significant amount of time on another matter of great ethical importance that we will focus upon. As in Enshittification, the problem is Big Tech. Says Doctorow: “Bosses hate paying workers, more than just about anything else. The history of industrial relations is the history of bosses finding new ways not to pay workers.” Doctorow makes a strong case that the leading AI firms are constantly exaggerating what their products can actually do so that bosses will buy their AI products. Doctorow lists several examples of firms whose adoption of chatbots or robots to replace human workers turned out disastrously and cites an MIT study finding that of the $30-40 billion firms have invested in adopting AI, “95% of commercial AI deployments fail, with ‘no measurable impact on profits.’”

In addition to exaggerating what their new AI models can do to help bosses replace workers, Doctorow is suspicious that the Big AI firms frequently warn us that their new products might just end the world as we know it or turn us all into paperclips so that investors will think of them as “disruptive” technologies of the sort that might enable an AI firm to break away from the pack and become the one company that will reap the gigantic profits that all AI investors are chasing. This is critical given the $4-8 trillion dollars expected to be invested in AI infrastructure over the next few years.

What if the new AI products don’t disrupt? What if they don’t improve firms’ profits? What if the trillions invested in building data centers never yield a positive return? Virtually none of the Big AI companies are yet making profits from their AI products. And there is little indication that they will soon. Doctorow is not alone in worrying that we are in the middle of a huge “AI bubble” and that if it bursts, terrible things will happen given that just seven huge AI companies currently account for 35% of the U.S. stock market. Corporate greed led to the Dot-com bubble and the Subprime bubble. The AI bubble could be next.

Many experts share Doctorow’s concerns, especially regarding the inability of the Big AI companies to develop a feasible business model. Others are confident that the new AI toys will enable firms to drastically slash their number of employees (though, if it happened, that by itself would also cause other sorts of economic catastrophes) and thereby find a profitable market for at least some of the Big AI companies.

Doctorow’s Reverse Centaur doesn’t settle any of these debates, but it is an entertaining and accessible introduction to many of the key ethical and economic issues that are taking center stage in this new Age of AI.

Sources:

Katrin Bennhold, “A.I.’s Big Next Step,” New York Times, May 28, 2026.

John Cassidy, “The A.I. Industry Is Booming. When Will It Actually Make Money? The New Yorker, May 4, 2026.  

Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life after AI: How to Think about Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late (2026).

Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (2025).

Stephen Marche, “Horse Sense,” New York Times, July 5, 2026 (book review).  

Michael McGrath, The Great AI Displacement: How AI Will Restructure Work and Replace Jobs (2026).

John McMurtrie, “Book Review,” Kirkus Reviews, Vol. 19, Issue 18, p. 52 (2025).

MIT NANDA, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 (2025).

Arvind Narayanan & Akash Kapur, “Up the Stack: How AI’s Escape from the Commodity Trap Risks Enterprise Lock-in,” AI as Normal Technology (Substack), July 2026

Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor, AI Snake Oil, What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference (2024).

Nadja Spiegelman et al., “What Silicon Valley is Coming for Next,” The New Yorker, May 20, 2026.

Nick Srnicek, Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI (2026).

David Wallace-Wells & Natasha Sarin, “The A.I. Bubble Is Coming for Your Retirement,” New York Times, June 10, 2025.