The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI

What Hacker News says

1. AmorymeltzerOct 2026
   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 cheating. Scammers will label their phone numbers as the customer service number for your cable operator or bank. Counterfeiters will label their batteries or phone cases as official accessories. It's hard enough to get people to correctly label their stuff—but fact-checking billions of labels created by millions of people, none of whom you know personally or whose identities you can verify? That's insurmountable.

   There's more he says—the preceding paragraph is below—but that line "there is a reward for cheating" is something I keep thinking about. It's hard not to see in so many of the discussions of LLMs.

   >For one thing, there are irreconcilable differences in the ways in which things should be described. A site run by transphobes isn't going to label every story about a trans woman as "a story about a woman," irrespective of what the standard says. Microsoft is never going to label Excel as equivalent to Apple's Numbers, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice's Calc. Hermès is never going to list a $40,000 handbag as being made of the same material and having the same capacity as a $30 leather handbag of the same size and shape.

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2. AmorymeltzerOct 2026
   >Not because any single task is harder. Because 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 hands atop a horse's strong body. Riding a bicycle or driving a car makes you a centaur; so does using the mute button on your TV remote when an ad comes on. Wearing a hearing aid makes you a centaur, and so does using a calculator to multiply large numbers. Being a centaur can be glorious.... Best of all, I get to choose exactly which of these features I use.... No one expects me to write more pages when I get a new tool.

   [snip]

   >>A reverse centaur is a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine. There's a classic I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel are working on an assembly line at a chocolate factory, taking bonbons off the belt and wrapping them in paper. As the belt goes taster and faster, Lucy and Ethel have to work at superhuman speed. They're reverse centaurs: the machine can move the chocolates from one place to another, but it needs a human to pack them into the box, and the humans who act as its assistant are made to work at a pace that exceeds all human capacity until calamity ensues.

   "More tasks all at once" is exactly the premise of that I Love Lucy episode.

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3. keyboredOct 2026
   A lot of my professional-pride and satisfaction kind of complaints with AI is that it uses space age technology for the stupidest and most primitive target: generating code. I’ve called this Flintstone Engineering. You have a remarkable technology but everything around it does not fit in. So you should definitely be more ambitious. You should think about formal verification and “super human” levels of testing and verification. You should consider making a very readable but maybe not performant oracle library to test alongside your really-used and maybe performance-tuned library. You should think of every avenue that before was too costly in terms of time and money—something that not even an independently wealthy OSS would think to do—and consider if the new kind of budget can accommodate it.

   And these ideas were always plenty of. The problem for me is that the incentives, so to speak, is to wow people with the Old World software but with “see, no brain”. And in turn you get two-hundred projects like that for every piece about rethinking software. And those pieces might just be at the zygote idea level. Could it be done? Yeah maybe.

   But the biggest problem is that this is not what GenAI or agentic AI is for. I don’t think it’s even debatable, even if you think the AI Cretins that a few years ago said that they will take everyone’s jobs out in public just changed their minds. Because the valuations and capital invested is to the point that they have to, really, make it possible to slash entire payrolls across sectors. If not they simply don’t get enough money back and the whole thing crashes.[1] And if you need these frontier models at subsidized electricity costs and not just the ones that can run on your desktop, either there is crash and no more frontier models or you are out of a job.

   And then where are the people that care so much about software?

   They are no where to be seen. All that are left are business people. To see business people software just open up any program from Established Tech, or any program from non-Tech but where they want to sell you something. There is apparently (let’s use revealed preference here) no business need to software that is good, stable, conforms to anything, or is nice to use. Because that cares so much about software person might want to make legible the prices on offer, the exact specifications, discovery—all things that business people want to frustrate in order to maintain information asymmetry.[2]

   As for compilers and interpreters and such. Okay, for who? Sure. Some people believe that they are in the 999‰ of developers. And now AI can finally vanquish those mediocre developers and productivity-boost 999‰ developers so that they get to sit at the right-hand side of the other worthy and hard-working cohort, uh, the people who had money and dumped it into AI. And they might even double their pay because thinking and making connections at that level would just boil 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

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4. jtipSep 2026
   "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

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5. tangotaylorAug 2026
   > In a past life I had to argue every year to renew a license for a profiling tool that cost about 20 EUR a month. I’ve heard since that everyone at the company is now getting a Claude subscription, even non-programmers.

   Underrated quote. I also found this frustrating. At one company I was at (a very old company which was trying to pivot to software engineering), we had hellish bureaucratic fights with the 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 over the workers.

   What's happening now is bosses are feeling pressure from investors to show productivity gains from using AI, so bosses panic-push AI within their companies. Which leads to misaligned incentives like tokenmaxxing.

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6. AnimatsJul 2026
   (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.

   I would have expected more focus on the relationship between AI and power. Doctorow has been down that road in his fiction. There's worry about government oppression, but government oppression has been around for most of recorded history, and probably peaked with East Germany. What he doesn't get into is how AI empowers corporations to be more obnoxious. Which is strange, because he's been into that in his fiction. See his "Unauthorized Bread".

   One thing AI does is to make corporate control of individuals cheaper. The classic Big Brother peaked, as mentioned, with East Germany, where about 10% of the population was involved with the Stasi. Only a government that didn't have to make a profit could do that. Corporations couldn't go in for that level of surveillance because it wasn't cost-effective when it was labor-intensive. With modern surveillance technology to collect data, and AI to analyze it, it now pays. See Flock, Google, etc.

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