The promise of artificial intelligence replacing human workers is as old as the loom, but according to tech writer Cory Doctorow, it's built on a fundamental misunderstanding of what AI can actually do. In a new book and recent interview, Doctorow challenges the grandiose claims made by tech leaders including Elon Musk, arguing that the real threat isn't AI becoming superintelligent, but rather the $1.4 trillion investment bubble that's already inflating around it.

What Is a "Reverse Centaur" and Why Should You Care?

Doctorow introduces a concept from automation theory to explain how AI is actually being deployed in the real world. A "centaur" is a person assisted by a machine; a "reverse centaur" is the opposite: a human conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine. The distinction matters because it reveals the gap between AI hype and reality.

Real-world examples illustrate the problem. Warehouse workers urinating in bottles to meet algorithmic fulfillment targets are reverse centaurs. Future truck drivers sitting in self-driving vehicles to prevent crashes, presumably at minimum wage rather than truck-driver wages, will be reverse centaurs. Lawyers checking Gemini's command of legal precedent, indie musicians scraping by performing covers of AI-generated hits; these are all reverse centaurs. The pattern shows that even when machines are supposed to replace humans, humans often end up supervising the machines instead.

Why Do Tech Leaders Keep Claiming AI Will End Civilization?

Elon Musk has called artificial intelligence the single greatest threat to human civilization. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has said it will "most likely lead to the end of the world." Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, forecast that AI would come to see humans the way we see animals: cute to have around but ultimately a resource to be exploited. These apocalyptic predictions sound like warnings, but Doctorow sees them differently.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI

"AI people claim they're about to create God, by teaching words to a word-guessing programme. It's grandiose," Doctorow said.

Cory Doctorow, Author and Tech Writer

According to Doctorow, these dramatic claims serve a purpose. They distract from the real motivation behind massive capital allocation to AI: the age-old boss's dream of replacing workers with machines. This isn't primarily about profit margins; it's about control. Even when machines ultimately cost more than humans or require so much human supervision that they become economically irrational, there remains tremendous appetite for automation because it eliminates something bosses fear most: worker co-determination.

How to Recognize AI Hype Versus Reality

• The Hallucination Problem: When AI generates nonsensical text, we call these errors "hallucinations," a term that obscures what's actually happening. Doctorow argues the real hallucination is ours; we impute intentionality and meaning to word patterns that have none, because in nature we don't encounter sentences without sentence writers or images without painters.
• The Consciousness Confusion: Claims that AI might become conscious often stem from forgetting what consciousness actually is. AI systems are sophisticated pattern-matching machines, not thinking entities with intentions or desires.
• The Bubble Economics: When Doctorow wrote his book last year, the AI investment bubble was valued at $700 billion. It has since doubled to $1.4 trillion, with projections heading toward $2.4 trillion. History shows bubbles always pop, though predicting exactly when remains impossible.

Doctorow emphasizes that AI cannot and will never render humans obsolete. "It's a conjuring trick," he explains. "That's probably the most important thing to get across." A machine has been invented that is really good at building sentences by predicting what word usually comes next, and we invest it with meaning and omnipotence. But we're imputing intentionality to something that intends nothing.

Doctorow

The real danger isn't existential; it's financial and social. Nine tech companies in the United States account for 35 percent of the entire stock market's valuation. When the war in Iran had a greater impact on European and Asian stock markets than America's, observers noted the U.S. was "insulated" by tech dominance. But insulation might not be the right word. Doctorow invokes two competing principles from finance law: Stein's Law, which states that anything unsustainable eventually stops, and Keynes's observation that markets can remain irrational longer than individuals can remain solvent. Bubbles will pop; predicting when is nearly impossible.

Doctorow, 54, is a prolific writer and tech commentator who came to mass attention with his book "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," published last year. The term has since entered common usage to describe how giant platforms lock users in and then deliberately degrade their experience. He holds an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University and is a professor-at-large at Cornell University. His sci-fi novels have won the Prometheus Award three times, and he publishes a newsletter almost daily.

The stakes of understanding AI's actual capabilities versus its promised ones are high. If we accept the false premise that machines will inevitably replace human workers, we surrender agency over our economic futures. If we recognize that the real motivation behind AI investment is control rather than efficiency, we can begin asking different questions about how this technology should be governed and deployed.