This week we’re speaking with friend of the pod, award-winning Canadian science-fiction author, journalist, and tech activist Cory Doctorow, who is back with a new book, “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life after AI.”
What the hell is a reverse centaur? I’m not going to spoil that for you, but I will say Doctorow is keenly focused on the power dynamics of technology: as he says on the pod, what a gadget does is less important than who it does it to, and who it does it for.
“I am
Cory DoctorowTron-pilled: I fight for the user. I want people to be in charge of their technology, not the other way around.”
That’s not an anti-technology take, by the way. Doctorow regularly uses AI, and his new book outlines healthy ways people can be assisted by the tech, rather than conscripted in service to it.
We talk about all of this, alongside the personal and macroeconomic pressures he sees fuelling unhealthy approaches to AI adoption. But this conversation is really about the fallacy of inevitability: less that technological change is coming, more that people have no say in how the change manifests.
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‘Fighting for the user’ in this way is why we got Doctorow to share an essay in our 2026 * BetaKit Most Ambitious* issue on the
need to jailbreak Canadaso it can reclaim its digital sovereignty, which we also discuss on the backend end of the pod.
Cory Doctorow is many things, but as I said up top, he’s a tech activist—and he wants us all to take action before it’s too late.
So, what is a reverse centaur? And how should we think about AI before it’s too late? Let’s dig in.
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