I’ve been writing and speaking about how to adopt AI intentionally, how to maintain human judgment, and how to ask the right questions before deploying a new tool. I think AI is great, that it has real applications, and that thoughtful leaders need to engage with it seriously. Thoughtful leaders should also read Cory Doctorow’s new book: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI
This book opened my eyes to the bigger picture surrounding AI and reminded me how much we’re giving up by moving as fast as we can towards “all things AI”. We’re killing the planet and fostering an AI financial bubble that is going to be hard to stomach when it pops.
Leaders shouldn’t read this book because it’s anti-AI. It isn’t really. Doctorow explains that he “uses AI in his own work every day and has no moral or dogmatic issue with the technology.” He thinks it’s useful, even exciting, and full of potential. Doctorow takes serious issue with the hype: who it’s for, who it benefits, and who ends up paying the price when it inevitably crashes. This is a book about capitalism and power. It’s also an instant New York Times bestseller and a fairly quick read.
Here’s what you need to know before deciding whether to pick-up a copy of your own.
What Is a Reverse Centaur?
In modern tech-speak, a centaur is a person who uses technology to become a better, more productive version of themselves. The technology amplifies your capabilities. You’re in charge. Think of a surgeon using AI imaging to catch things the human eye would miss, or a researcher using machine learning to find patterns in datasets too large to read manually. The human sets the direction; the machine helps them go further.
A reverse centaur is the opposite: a person that technology forces to work at an inhuman pace. For example, a driver made to deliver all day long nonstop. Or a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks. It includes programmers made to crank out impossible amounts of code. In the reverse centaur model, the machine sets the pace and you serve it, not the other way around. A centaur has autonomy and control. A reverse centaur is essentially a technological servant.
I have a friend in DevOps who appears to be a reverse centaur right now. A year ago, we’d chat briefly during the day and take occasional turns on our online board games. She finished her work, but she also had time to breathe. Now she’s managing dozens of AI agents, sometimes around the clock, responding to alerts, triaging automated decisions, essentially becoming the human error-handler for a system that moves faster than she can think. She’s too busy to chat during the day anymore. She is serving the machine. I asked her if the results were better. Are the AI agents catching more production issues or creating more value for the customer? She didn’t think so.
This is the frame through which Doctorow wants you to understand this AI moment. Not “will AI take my job?” but “are we deploying AI in ways that make my work better, or in ways that make me an appendage of a system I don’t control?”
The Book’s Structure: Before, During, and After the Bubble
Doctorow structures the book around a timeline that I found interesting: what’s going on before, during, and after the AI bubble. He says we’re absolutely experiencing an AI financial bubble that will pop and here’s why.
Before: The Hype Is Not for You
The first thing Doctorow establishes is that the billionaires managing the rise of AI are putting on a performance for investors, not for ordinary people who might use the products.
This is the key to understanding everything that follows. The AI hype cycle is not for you. It’s not for your boss. It’s aimed at investors and specifically at convincing them that AI represents an extraordinary growth opportunity worth pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into.
Here’s why that matters: Doctorow explains how growth companies, those with high price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios, occupy a uniquely powerful position in the economy. They can borrow against their own stock, which they essentially create themselves. This allows them to raise enormous amounts of capital, fund losses for years, and buy influence and market position that mature companies with normal valuations simply cannot match. Mature companies can’t do what growth companies can, because they don’t have the inflated P/E ratios working in their favor.
So AI companies have every incentive to maintain the narrative that they are growth companies on the verge of changing everything. The hype isn’t incidental to the business model. It is the business model, or at least a critical part of it.
And as Doctorow notes, for AI companies to make back the hundreds of billions their investors have entrusted them with, they will have to displace a hell of a lot of high-wage labor. That’s not a side effect of the technology. It’s the stated pitch to investors. Workers’ job worries are real, but not because AI can actually do their jobs, but because AI companies are working so hard to convince your bosses that it can.
During: The Hype Convincing Managers To Do Things AI Can’t Actually Do
Here’s what I find most alarming, because I’ve watched it happen: AI cannot do your job. But the hype is convincing managers to lay you off anyway.
Ninety-five percent of AI deployments fail with no measurable impact on profits. Doctorow cites this number directly and it’s worth repeating: 95% of AI deployments fail with no measurable impact on profits. And get this: the majority of regular consumers (that’s you and me, roughly 90% of us, according to Doctorow’s data) are less likely to buy or use products they know are AI-based or AI-enabled.
None of this makes it into the pitch to investors. The pitch to investors is about the promise that AI will very soon be able to do all sorts of jobs. The reality, for the workers displaced by tools that can’t replace them and the companies that discover the efficiency gains didn’t materialize, is considerably less exciting. He describes numerous examples of why AI can’t possibly do, say, a radiologists job as well as a human over time.
The technology is not the problem. The power structures that deploy technology in ways that harm workers are the problem. The question is always who is making the decision, and whose interests they’re serving.
After: What the Bubble Leaves Behind
Doctorow is clear that the AI financial bubble will pop and let’s face it, you probably already thought this was going to happen. He’s not hedging on this. And he wants you to understand both what will be lost and what will remain after the bubble bursts. Not everything that survives a bubble crash is bad.
What gets left behind that’s bad: The big data centers, built at enormous environmental cost, will sit there. AI is already an environmental disaster in terms of energy consumption and water usage, and the infrastructure doesn’t disappear when the investment thesis collapses. On-device models, the smaller, more personal AI tools that could actually be useful and privacy-respecting, may also be caught in the wreckage, or, if they’ve got enough capital, may survive and still be useful. And anyone invested significantly in AI will lose a lot of money, even if you’re in the relatively “safe” low-cost index funds which will also dip when the bubble pops.
What gets left behind that might be good: The actual useful applications. Doctorow notes that AI has promise in medicine, data analysis, creative work, and scientific research. Some of the tools being built right now are legitimately useful and will remain so after the hype deflates. The crash won’t take down everything, it will take down the inflated expectations, the fraudulent deployments, and the companies that were always more narrative than substance.
What This Means for the Rest of Us
I’ve been in technology for twenty-plus years and have watched the hype cycles come and go. If you’re anxious about AI right now, whether you’re worried about your job, confused by the pace of change, or wondering whether you’re falling behind, the hype is not for you. It’s performing for investors. Your instinct that something about this feels overblown is correct and the data Doctorow cites suggests you’re in the significant majority who feel that way.
That doesn’t mean AI is useless. It isn’t. I use it in my work. Some of it is very good. But “some AI tools are useful” is a very different claim from “AI is about to replace a hell of a lot of high-wage labor, oh, and maybe become smarter than us and take over the world”. It won’t.
Read this book. It will give you the vocabulary and the conceptual framework to see through the performance and to ask who the AI deployment is actually serving. It will help you to distinguish centaur from reverse centaur and understand why the hype exists and whose interests it serves.
Then, perhaps, if you’re acting like a reverse centaur right now, you can extract yourself from the machine and convince your friends to do that same so you can go back to chatting with them during the day. We could all use a break from these agents.
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow was published June 23, 2026 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It was an instant New York Times bestseller and is available wherever books are sold. Also consider checking out a copy for free from your local library.
