Lawfare Daily: ‘The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI’—A Conversation with Cory Doctorow

On this episode of Lawfare Daily, Senior Editor Kate Klonick and Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein speak with Cory Doctorow—science fiction author, activist, journalist, adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the writer who coined "enshittification"—about his new book, “The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.” Doctorow argues that the most important thing about the AI boom isn't what the technology can or can't do, but the historic investment bubble and the new arrangements of work being built on top of it—the same analytic lens he brought to platform decay, now turned on AI.

They discuss whether the AI bubble will actually burst or merely deflate, and the unit economics underneath it; the "reverse centaur," the worker conscripted to serve the machine; and how it maps onto a broader culture and questions of AI "knowledge collapse," the human analogue to AI model collapse.

Additional Resources:

• Cory Doctorow's daily newsletter, Pluralistic 
• Ed Zitron, "The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble," (Where's Your Ed At, 2025)
• Andrew J. Peterson, "AI and the Problem of Knowledge Collapse" (arXiv, 2024)
• Benjamin Recht, “The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us” (Princeton University Press, 2026)

This episode also ran as an episode of Scaling Laws with an introduction from Alan Rozenshtein. Find Scaling Laws on the Lawfare website, and subscribe to never miss an episode.

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