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

This book was not as good as Doctorow's previous one, Enshittification. It rehashes a lot from the earlier book. Here Doctorow seems to often shoot from the hip. In Enshittification there wasn't a ton of evidence in support of his claims, but they still seemed quite persuasive. Here the evidence and assessment is thinner. For example, he blithely dismisses self-driving cars by referring to a handful of accidents - without considering that (I believe) self-driving cars' safety record is better than that of human drivers. I still learned interested things, and as always Doctorow's prose is very entertaining. He made an interesting, if not definitive, case that AI is a bubble and scam driven by Big Tech's need to come up with the next growth driver. My biggest beef with the book relates to its core argument. Doctorow says that what a technology does doesn't matter; what matters is who it does it for and to. In this case, he says, AI (like Big Tech, generally) is benefitting bosses and the owners of capital and is hurting workers. That may be the case. But I think it's simplistic to say that what a technology does doesn't matter. From Marshall McLuhan to Walter Ong to Neil Postman to Sherry Turkle and others, many scholars have made a persuasive case, I think, that the technology itself, our use of it, can affect us a great deal. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail - that idea. p.s. I should say something about the title. A centaur - a bull with a man's head - refers to a person using a tool. This is usually a good thing. The person is in charge. A reverse centaur, by contrast, means the machine is directing the human. But as I suggest above, what Doctorow means by this is not what I worry about, that machines change us. What he means is that giant tech companies and their AI systems employ human cogs.