The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI

”[Doctorow] resembles the great rock critics of an earlier era, a high-tech Greil Marcus or even a Lester Bangs. He possesses a useful combination of real knowledge and close observation … He is superb, as expected, on the anatomy of Silicon Valley rhetoric and self-aggrandizement … He also makes one of the most convincing arguments I have read about what will happen when the A.I. bubble pops.” –Stephen Marche, The New York Times Book Review

“Lucid and compelling … The concept of the “reverse centaur” gets at something real and vital about our relationship to AI … [Doctorow’s analysis] rings truer than what most of AI’s best-known prophets and detractors have thus far predicted.” –Tim Wu, Science

“Doctorow speeds through this entertaining primer with his usual vivid analogies, righteous ire and snarky asides … [He] isn’t animated by the headline-grabbing concerns, whether existential risk or AI psychosis, deepfake porn or election disinformation, because those are unintended consequences. His target is the revenue model and the bubble it has created: ‘To be an effective AI critic, you need to strike at the source of AI’s power, which is the investment capital it attracts.’” –Dorian Lynskey, The Guardian

“Doctorow busts some myths, advocates for creators, considers the potential ‘residue’ of a popped AI bubble, and describes ways AI does-and can-benefit our world. From his opinionated, passionate, and substantiated take, readers can form, centaur-like, their own AI perspectives.” -Erin Douglass, The Christian Science Monitor

“There are already a lot of books about AI, with more on the way. Consider this one to be mandatory reading. It’s lively, entertaining, angry, wry, passionate, and vastly informative.” –Booklist

“An eye-opening take on AI … A sharply worded, irreverent, and deadly serious call to see through the sleight-of-hand performance of AI promoters.” –Kirkus Reviews

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of many books, including The Lost Cause, a solarpunk science-fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency. His nonfiction book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation is a Big Tech disassembly manual. Other recent books include Enshittification; Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller; Chokepoint Capitalism, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the Little Brother series for young adults; In Real Life, a graphic novel; and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

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