The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AICory Doctorow
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI
by Cory Doctorow · first published 2026
8mentions
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7HN commenters
2025–2026first – last mentioned
14% recommend57% neutral29% critical
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I'm reminded of a section of Cory Doctorow's latest non-fiction, The Reverse Centaur's Guide To Life After AI (it is of course an excellent read), where he discusses how the semantic web and having an internet set-up for agents and AI to use won't work: >It also hasn't happened because there is a reward for…
on “Publish fake stats, get cited in LLMs” ↗…there are so many more of them, all at once. There's a nuance here since the author says "Almost all of this is private work," but this is basically the entire premise of Cory Doctorow's excellent The Reverse Centaur's Guide To Life After AI, which everyone should read. If I may quote: >>In automation theory (the academic study of automation), a centaur is a person who is assisted by a machine. Think of a clever human's head, arms, and…
on “AI promised less work. I've never worked more” ↗I recently preordered Cory Doctorow's book dealing with this: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. The title refers to most machinery being a "centaur," meaning a thinking human is carried by the machine doing the heavy lifting, while the goal of AI companies is to replace high value work with the…
on “Apple accidentally left Claude.md files Apple Support app” ↗(2025) Doctorow has a book-length version of this, "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI", which I just read. It's not one of his better works. It's all conventional anti-AI wisdom. Too much of it is about the impact of AI on the punditry and writing industries. I expected better from Doctorow.…
on “Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox” ↗…IT department to get access to Pycharm, Obsidian, and even GitHub. But then the AI craze dropped and management just gave us all GitHub Copilot access without us even asking. Cory Doctorow's book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI talks more about this. It's just a modern symptom of an age-old power struggle. The workers want more control over their craft, including quality standards and tools, but their bosses want more control…
on “An Honest Review of AI Programming” ↗"Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great" by Eric Ries The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (How to Think About Artificial Intelligence-Before It's Too Late) By Cory Doctorow
on “Ask HN: What are you reading?” ↗…all the lakes if they tried to build an AI to do that. And what will they do with that power? Hmm, follow orders and keep making business software? Just looking at history here. [1] Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI [2] ibid
on “We should be more ambitious with the software we build” ↗> and it's based on the manuscript for my next book, "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI," which will be out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next June: Yea nah not worth reading as its just advertisement.
on “The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Criticizing AI” ↗