A “centaur” is a human helped by a machine: the person sets the direction, the machine supplies the horsepower, and together they are better than either one alone.

Tech activist Cory Doctorow’s nightmare is the reverse centaur: a human conscripted to serve a machine. His key example is the delivery driver whose route, pace and bathroom breaks are dictated by an algorithm. The machine does the thinking; the human supplies a cheap, disposable body.

Doctorow is the science fiction novelist who gave us “enshittification”: the word for how tech platforms start off as free and amazing, until tech companies need to turn a profit – then you become the product, and the platform becomes sludge.

Review: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late by Cory Doctorow (Verso)

This time, he argues the AI industry’s most valuable product is a lie: “AI is about to make workers obsolete.” Every time we repeat the lie, we help a salesman convince our boss to replace us with cheaper software that can’t properly do our job.

If you’re an artist or you love one, or if you nodded along to his last book, Enshittification, this one will make you feel seen and it will stoke your burning anger. If you want an accurate forecast of where AI is heading and a plan for what to do about it, the book is more likely to mislead than inform you.

Yes, AI companies want to make money

In Doctorow’s writing, the history of industrial relations is the history of bosses finding new ways not to pay workers, “from stealing their wages […] to misclassifying workers as contractors […] to offshoring jobs”. AI, in his telling, is the latest instrument: fire workers and replace them with a chatbot, or keep them on as reverse centaurs, babysitting one.

I don’t read industrial history quite that darkly. But Doctorow’s reading of it shows his cards – and who he’s writing for.

Even so, I agree with a lot of the book’s other claims. Yes, AI companies want to make money and the companies adopting AI want to save money. Yes, AI can be a siren’s song, atrophying our skills while drawing us toward the rocks. And yes, if we hand more and more of our decisions to AI, it ends badly for society, so we should be doing things now to avert that.

As Doctorow puts it: “The social arrangements of technology are........

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