Friday, June 19, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
 CLICK HERE TO RSVP _**RSVP is recommended but not required. Entry and seating are first-come, first-served. RSVPs do not guarantee entry to a full event.**_ **A short, provocative guide to what's good, bad, and stupid about AI and the discourse around AI, by the author of _Enshittification_.** In modern tech parlance, a _centaur_ is a person who is able to use technology to be a better, more productive version of themself. A _reverse centaur_ is a person who is forced by technology to work at an inhuman pace—a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code. _The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI_ is not another anti-AI screed. Cory Doctorow uses AI in his work every day. As a creative person, he has no moral or dogmatic issue with AI—he thinks the technology is useful, even exciting, and full of potential. And yet. AI has arrived surrounded by unprecedented hype driven by a tech industry desperate to maintain its unprecedented valuation based on its own promises of endless financial growth. Despite the fact that almost all of AI’s real-world implementations have proved underwhelming, AI is projected to be worth more than $16 trillion—a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of “value,” every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI. For Doctorow, it is imperative to see through that hype to the real story, to understand the technology not just for what it does, but for who it does it to and who it does it for. From that point of view, the story of AI is indeed dramatic and unprecedented, having generated an investment bubble so big that it endangers the entire world economy. In _The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI_—as he so successfully did in _Enshittification_—Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life “after” AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around. **Cory Doctorow** is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of many books, including The Lost Cause, a solarpunk science-fiction novel of hope amid the climate emergency. His nonfiction book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation is a Big Tech disassembly manual. Other recent books include Enshittification; Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller; Chokepoint Capitalism, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the Little Brother series for young adults; In Real Life, a graphic novel; and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. **Brian Merchant** is a writer, reporter and author based in Los Angeles. Author of the newsletter BLOOD IN THE MACHINE and a reporter in residence at the AI Now Institute, his work has appeared in The New York Times, WIRED, Harper’s, The Guardian, and beyond. Previously, he was the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times and the senior editor at Motherboard. He is the author of The One Device: the Secret History of the iPhone (2017) and Blood in the Machine: the Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech (2023), and a founder of VICE’s speculative fiction outlet Terraform. He coedited a best-of anthology, Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn, in 2022.