My latest Locus column is "Reverse Centaurs," and it sets out to unravel a paradox: how is it that some AI's users describe their experience as a hellish ordeal, while others delight in the ways that AI is changing their lives for the better?
Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Last night, I gave a speech for the University of Washington's "Neuroscience, AI and Society" lecture series, through the university's Computational Neuroscience Center. It was called "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI," 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:
Pluralistic: Kickstarting “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI” (14 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
My next book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, will be out in about a month – and (once again) Amazon's monopoly audiobook platform refuses to carry it, and so (once again) I'm pre-selling the audio, ebook and print edition in a Kickstarter campaign that proves that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them:
Pluralistic: Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (29 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
It's safe to say that the past couple of years have been good ones for me publishing-wise, thanks to a string of international bestsellers, both novels (Picks and Shovels) and nonfiction (Enshittification, Reverse Centaur), as well as plenty of awards and accolades:
Pluralistic: Three more AI psychoses (12 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
"AI psychosis" is one of those terms that is incredibly useful and also almost certainly going to be deprecated in smart circles in short order because it is: a) useful; b) easily colloquialized to describe related phenomena; and c) adjacent to medical issues, and there's a group of people who feel very strongly any metaphor that implicates human health is intrinsically stigmatizing and must be replaced with an awkward, lengthy phrase that no one can remember and only insiders understand.
Pluralistic: The ordinariness of evil (19 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Maybe it seems weird that AI bosses won't stop publicly rending their garments about the terrible potential of their products, from the jobspocalypse that will ensue when AI can do our jobs better than us, to the impending moment when the word-guessing programs learn too many words, wake up and turn us all into paperclips.
Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon (29 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.
Pluralistic: The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh (27 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Like you, I'm sick to the back teeth of talking about AI. Like you, I keep getting dragged into discussions of AI. Unlike you‡, I spent the summer writing a book about why I'm sick of writing about AI⹋, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in 2026.
Pluralistic: AI psychosis and the warped mirror (18 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
"AI psychosis" is the pop-psych diagnosis in a recent string of horrible and horrifying cases in which vulnerable people were lured by chatbots into harming themselves and others, including a murder-suicide:
Pluralistic: AI solipsists and AI cynics (24 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
As a technology, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:
Pluralistic: How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (16 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
There's lots of reasons to believe the "hyperscaler" model of AI can never be profitable, and not just because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products):
How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots
Sci-fi author/tech journalist Cory Doctorow on his new book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.
Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion
For decades, the artificial intelligence (AI) “singularity” has been heralded as a single, titanic mind bootstrapping itself to godlike intelligence, consolidating all cognition into a cold silicon point. But this vision is almost certainly wrong in its most fundamental assumption. If AI development follows the path of previous major evolutionary transitions or “intelligence explosions,” our current step-change in computational intelligence will be plural, social, and deeply entangled with its forebears (us!).
Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Once you understand the corporate culture of AI "hyperscalers" consists primarily of everyone cooking their brains by locking themselves in the bathroom, holding flashlights under their chins, and saying "Aaaaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeee" until they wet themselves in terror, a lot of things snap into focus:
Pluralistic: No one wants to read your AI slop (02 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Everyone knows (or should know) that as fascinating as your dreams are to you, they are eye-glazingly dull to everyone else. Perhaps you have a friend or two who will tolerate you recounting your dreams at them (treasure those friends), but you should never, ever presume that other people want to hear about your dreams.
Pluralistic: Goodhart’s Law (of AI) (11 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
One way to think about AI's unwelcome intrusion into our lives can be summed up with Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure":
Pluralistic: AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot (04 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
It's easy to understand why some programmers love their AI assistants and others loathe them: the former group get to decide how and when they use AI tools, while the latter has AI forced upon them by bosses who hope to fire their colleagues and increase their workload.