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Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

AI doomerism is misplaced. Here’s what it will take to pop the bubble

Cory Doctorow argues AI dominance is not inevitable. How we fight back matters

Published June 22, 2026 6:30AM (EDT)

Nostalgia is supposed to take at least a decade or more to kick in, but nowadays people are already pining for just a few years ago, before the president was drenching us in crappy AI memes and reply guys were asking Grok what they should believe. For better or worse — and we all know it’s for worse — artificial intelligence has become a part of everyday life. Kids are using AI for much more than just school, whether parents know it or not, and nearly every company on the S&P 500 is experimenting with the tech in some way, riding a tsunami of layoffs as bosses replace their workers with chatbots. Even the pope is dropping hot takes on the topic, decrying the “new forms of slavery” that AI threatens us with.

The negativity is overwhelming. Only 16% of Americans predict AI will be positive for society, according to recent polling from Pew Research — the rest voted negative (40%) or equally good and bad (31%), while 13% were unsure. But have we forgotten that AI is just a tool? Like any technology, from rockets to medications, it matters who uses it and how. Rockets can be used for space exploration or for bombing villages. Drugs can be healers or poisons. Most people understand that AI  tech can be used to ruin our lives or improve them, but at this point the constructive use cases seem few and far between. Between the deluge of data centers that represent a stunning environmental and financial crisis at the same time and the use of AI for mass surveillance and war crimes, pessimism seems warranted.

But most people also realize that even if the AI bubble pops like a bulging pimple and Mark Zuckerberg is  forced to get a real job, the tech itself is here to stay in some form. All the more reason to start immediately imagining — or demanding — a better future in which humans make the decisions about what happens to AI, rather than one where AI bots (and the tech bros behind them) decide what happens to humans.

That’s one of many arguments in Cory Doctorow’s new book, “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI,” which provides a succinct blueprint for how to think differently about our new normal. Doctorow, a renowned sci-fi author, tech activist and journalist, wears many hats — including once upon a time, as a Salon contributor, back when the idea of a digital magazine seemed new and unlikely. He gained a recent bump in notoriety for coining the term “ens**ttification,” which was also the title of his previous book, which describes how tech companies are squeezing the life out of everything in pursuit of profit. Arguably, AI has only intensified the en-you-know-what.

In automation theory, Doctorow writes, a centaur is “a person who is assisted by a machine.” A reverse centaur, as the name implies, is a beast with a horse’s head and a human’s ass. Doctorow proposes this is essentially what happens when humans are ridden by tech, as when the poverty-level wages and surveillance capitalism of Uber, Amazon and other is powered by AI algorithms. The only solution, he believes, is to pop this AI bubble and salvage what we can, before things get worse.

Salon spoke with Doctorow about the use of AI in warfare, Elon Musk as the globe’s first trillionaire and why the film “WarGames” is a useful metaphor but pretty distant from reality.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

There are a lot of narratives about AI that people take for granted, including “AI will take our jobs” or “someday AI will be smarter than humans,” or even that AI literally means “artificial intelligence.” Your book basically tells us to stop repeating these talking points, not just because they’re untrue, but because this is mostly a labor issue, not an intelligence or creativity issue. Do you see the narrative shifting as people wake up to the reality of AI, or are we stuck with these misguided framings?

The book is doing more than one thing. You’re right that I’m describing the labor issue that falls out of the way that AI is being sold, but I think more foundationally is the material, financial basis for the AI bubble. The AI bubble is the biggest tech bubble we’ve ever had. That’s because the bubble’s promoters are promising that they can replace labor, so you can’t disentangle those two.

We’ve been through so many of these bubbles. I know we kind of forget them, because as a society we have the object permanence of like a two-month-old, and we routinely lose games of peekaboo to our policymakers. But the question of why we have these bubbles, I think, is not well explored. It’s usually hand-waved away as a greed thing or by saying that people are scammers, but the material basis for successful tech companies telling lies about what they’re going to do next, or uttering what they believe to be premature truths that may never materialize, is that firms that saturate their markets stop growing.

The leftist shibboleth that eternal growth is the ideology of a tumor actually is quite naïve. There’s a good material reason to have eternal growth, which is that when you stop growing, investors revalue your shares at a tiny fraction of their current value, because a share is a claim on the future earnings of a company, and the future earnings of a company that’s growing are worth more than the future industry earnings of a company that stop growing.

Not only is the personal net worth of the executives who’ve been compensated in stock coupled with that share price, but also your shares can be used to buy other companies if you’re growing. If you’re not, you’ve got to use money, which is hard to get, whereas you get shares by typing zeros into a........

© Salon