The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI Quotes

“Practically everyone who falls for the AI hype is dreaming of getting a human need fulfilled without having to extend moral consideration.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late

“Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late

“There is one thing SF writers know that the AI bosses who are gunning for generational dynastic wealth by transforming us all into AI-lashed reverse centaurs do not know, and that they absolutely don't want you to know. That thing is this: the future is up for grabs. It is not inevitable. AI isn't a genie that can't be put back into a bottle. How we use AI is up to us. Whether we use AI is up to us. The future can be ours, if we never stop remembering that the most important fact about a technology isn't what it does, it's who it does it for, and who it does it to.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI

“In the space of just a few months, Google declared its first dividend, fired twelve thousand workers (including many of its most senior—and thus most mouthy—technical staff), and declared a $70 billion stock buyback, which would have paid those workers’ wages for the next twenty-seven years.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late

“The fact that there’s a low probability that an AI will be able to do your job doesn’t change the fact that there’s a high probability that an AI salesman will convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late

“Defenders of Al will often cite other technologies that were costly at the outset, like the web itself, as evidence that Al will soon solve all its energy and scale problems.
But the web revolution was a decade of unbroken drops in the cost of servicing each new web user. In economics terms, the web had great "unit economics" —the cost of each web session fell and fell, even as the cost of getting on the web (from hardware to software to connectivity) was also falling.
Not so with AI. Each generation of AI foundation models has been vastly more expensive to train and operate than the previous generation. Not only that, but many refinements in Al that are meant to improve accuracy and reduce "hallucinations" involve breaking a prompt down into multiple pieces and prompting an Al to respond to each prompt, turning that response into a new prompt, over and over again, to produce "chains of thought.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI

“We sometimes talk about training an AI as though we were teaching it about the subjects of the documents we’ve used to train it. But when an AI ingests a Wikipedia entry about types of soup, it’s not learning anything about soup. It is learning about the word frequency in articles about soup.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI

“These fears (or hopes) of a nascent superintelligence that will spontaneously arise if we just give enough computing power and training data to large language models are absurd on their face. They make sense only if you believe that “being conscious” is a matter of being really good at guessing which word is statistically most likely to come after the previous one.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late

“Contract nurses used to find work through regional nurse staffing agencies. There were several of these competing in each market. However, with the rise of app-based “Uber for nursing” digital hiring tools, the regional staffing agencies have given way to a cartel of four nurse-hiring apps: CareRev, Clipboard Health, ShiftKey, and ShiftMed. In Wells and Spilda’s report, they describe how these apps buy nurses’ credit history from data brokers before offering them a shift, and then reduce the wage on offer for nurses with a lot of credit-card debt. Those nurses, after all, are more economically desperate and thus likely to accept a lower wage.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late

“It’s fine to be “anti-AI bubble,” but it’s pretty silly to be “anti-statistical analysis” and “anti-machine learning” and “anti-automated inference.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late

“Failing that, they’re making a bet that AI companies’ sales staff can convince employers to fire half their employees and replace them with AI that can’t do their jobs, and that no one will figure this out until after the AI companies’ investors have cashed out.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late

“No wonder Indian wags have a new, wry joke for it: they say the “GPT” in “ChatGPT” stands for “Gujarati People Typing.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late

“But in 2024, just before Amazon announced that it was shutting down these stores, reporting by Theo Wayt in The Information revealed that the “AI cameras” that observed your shopping and debited your account were just regular CCTVs, wired up to vast call centers in India, where up to three workers observed each shopper, furiously clicking their best guess for what the shopper had put in their basket.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late

“In Wells and Spilda’s report, they describe how these apps buy nurses’ credit history from data brokers before offering them a shift, and then reduce the wage on offer for nurses with a lot of credit-card debt. Those nurses, after all, are more economically desperate and thus likely to accept a lower wage.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late

“In July 2025, Delta Air Lines announced a partnership with Fetcherr, an Israeli surveillance pricing company, claiming that they would be charging each passenger a different price based on the commercial surveillance data they held on them, which would be converted to a price by means of AI analytics.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late

“This is the coprophagic AI problem: when you feed a bot on botshit, you get something AI researchers call “model collapse,” a dramatic reduction in the quality of the guesses the bot makes. It’s like the errors in a model’s outputs are bioaccumulating through the food chain. Whatever the demerits of AI decision support and decision-making that’s based on biased data produced by humans in a state of nature, an AI that’s trained on the actions of humans that were fed predictions based on that biased data becomes rapidly, irretrievably, almost comically biased.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late

“That makes “runaway AI” a very good subject for AI concerns, since (a) it’s not real; and (b) eliminating the possibility of runaway AI has no impact on the revenue projections of AI companies.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late

“That certainly doesn’t seem to be the case for junior coders, whose “vibe coding” efforts might produce quick-and-dirty tools for one-off usage—for example, a script to reformat a single text file, once—but who lack the depth of experience to vet AI-produced production code for subtle errors that accumulate as “technical debt” in the enterprise systems they work on. Worse: without the hard-won experience of creatively solving a succession of programming challenges, these junior coders may never develop the requisite depth of expertise needed to do a thorough review of AI-generated code.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late

“In the space of just a few months, Google declared its first dividend, fired twelve thousand workers (including many of its most senior—and thus most mouthy—technical staff),”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late

“science fiction tells us that the most important aspect of a new technology isn’t what the machine does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late