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:
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.
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:
No. 010: AutoScientists governance, AI-agent monoculture, nonsense-term retractions - The Hallway Track
The Hallway Track No. 010 - How AI is affecting the practice of science
My Objections to "We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky" — AI Alignment Forum
Introduction I recently watched Eliezer Yudkowsky's appearance on the Bankless podcast, where he argued that AI was nigh-certain to end humanity. Sin…
Pluralistic: Writing vs AI (07 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I come from a family of teachers – both parents taught all their lives and now oversee Ed.D candidates, brother owns a school – which has left me painfully aware of the fact that I am not a great teacher.
233. "The Illusion of Thinking" — Thoughts on This Important Paper
This is a fantastic paper. I just love it. tl;dr AI is not human. Anthropomorphization has been bad for AI, LLMs, and Chat. Clippy walked so today's AI could run.
Pluralistic: Why I don’t like AI art (25 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and post-docs – for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.
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: AI and the fatfinger economy (02 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Have you noticed that all the buttons you click most frequently to invoke routine, useful functions in your device have been moved, and their former place is now taken up by a curiously butthole-esque icon that summons an unwanted AI?
No. 003: Bixonimania hoax, Google's paper-writing agents, AlphaFold expands the frontier - The Hallway Track
The Hallway Track No. 003 - How AI is affecting the practice of science
No. 007: Fabricated citations at scale, vibe physics, zero-click readership - The Hallway Track
The Hallway Track No. 007 - How AI is affecting the practice of science
AI, Ethics, and Society — Home
No. 021: AI peer review ensembles, Riemann zeta bound, VibeMathed registry - The Hallway Track
The Hallway Track No. 021 - How AI is affecting the practice of science
Collection of collections: AI
Based on the articles I’ve saved, I think you can see why I have a more negative view of AI (and the role they’re playing in society thus far) than a positive one, generally speaking. But again, I don’t consider myself “pro-AI” or “anti-AI.”
Specific AI* products (by あ) — Semble
AI* and the Dead Internet Theory/Zombie Internet (by あ) — Semble
Books destroyed in the name of AI* (by あ) — Semble
Human-powered AI* (by あ) — Semble
AI* in languages other than English (by あ) — Semble
AI* doomsday (by あ) — Semble