Billionaire tech bros will have you believe that AI is an unstoppable force, so infinite in its potential that no sensible alternative exists other than to embrace it — including the side effects for workers, such as job loss. Cory Doctorow is here to tell you that this narrative is utterly bunk.

“We don’t have to believe that if you breed horses to run faster and faster, they’ll eventually give birth to a locomotive,” Doctorow said, appearing on stage in the Fitler Club ballroom during a Citizen event on June 25.

Doctorow, an influential blogger, sci-fi novelist, and activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, came to Philly to discuss his new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After A.I.: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence. [Read an excerpt here] It’s the follow-up to his 2025 best-selling book Enshitification, which was titled after a term that Doctorow famously coined to describe how digital services always seem to get worse, and not by accident — but rather, at the behest of wealthy shareholders and market forces.

After throwing some cold water on the technological abilities of these new technologies — “AI is the latest in a string of tech bubbles that we’ve lived through,” the author told an audience of roughly 100 people in the Fitler Club Ballroom — Doctorow shared solutions for how to center humanity in a future that includes AI, without ceding too much ground.

“The most important fact about a technology isn’t what it does,” Doctorow — the former editor of the widely popular Boing Boing blog and current writer of Pluralistic.net — said, “[but instead] who it does it for and who it does it to.”

In conversation with Citizen contributor David Williams, Doctorow spoke enthusiastically about a recent trend of Americans coming together to block data centers, signalling “a shift in the politics” around AI which might lead to further collective action in communities and workplaces writ large. Because the biggest questions surrounding AI aren’t about the technology itself, he said, but the power imbalances they create.

Here are a few highlights from the event.

A reverse centaur?

The title of Doctorow’s new book refers to a traditional centaur, which, in Greek mythology, has a human head and torso atop the lower half of a horse. This mirrors the ideal relationship between humans and technology, assisting human intellect and abilities rather than replacing them. On the other hand, a reverse centaur — with a horse head — conjures the image of a human as the subordinate, forced to adapt to a machine’s pace.

And that’s one of Doctorow’s fears about AI. While he’s not losing sleep over AI becoming sentient and turning humanity into zoo creatures, Doctorow used historical examples to illustrate the real threats it poses to workers.

“One of the things that’s broadly understood [in history] is that when labor is in charge of adopting automation, typically it is adopted in service of improving the quality of the output,” he said. “[But] when capital is in charge, it’s typically done in service to increase the throughput.”

In other words, workers must find ways of retaining their autonomy, and for Doctorow, unions will play a key role in ensuring that reality.

Shopping isn’t politics

Doctorow challenged the idea that AI adoption is inevitable or beyond democratic control. Along with that, he suggested that resistance would have to be creative collectively — not individually, such as through boycotts of AI-powered companies.

“You can make a change in your community by shopping at the store you love, but it’s not going to change Jeff Bezos’ ability to impact our politics,” Doctorow said. If you want to accomplish that larger goal, he said, “break up his companies and unionize his workers.”

Collective bargaining will be critical in the fight over the future of work, the author argued, though workers must be savvy in their approach. Doctorow pointed to the success of the screenwriters’ guild in Hollywood as one example. Instead of trying to force studios to abolish AI, or focusing on copyright laws, the screenwriters instead prioritized a contract that prevented the studios from cutting their pay. “That was an amazing victory,” he said.

Don’t “criti-hype”

Large technology companies face enormous pressure to continually demonstrate future growth, and thus, AI has become an incredibly powerful narrative — a myth of infinite potential and never-ending progress. Except, it’s not only the billionaire CEOs perpetuating this narrative. It’s also a lot of the critics.

Doctorow borrowed a term coined by scholar Lee Vinsel, “criti-hype,” to explain the importance of selecting the right arguments in attempts to curtail aspects of AI. Sometimes, critics will overstate the powers of AI, as a way to scare others away, but they manage to inadvertently add to the hype. “There are a bunch of people who are running around saying, AI is going to wake up and turn us into paper clips,” he said, which only serves to increase the valuations of these AI companies. That’s criti-hype.

If there was one takeaway from the evening, it was this: Conversations about artificial intelligence should spend less time asking what the technology might someday become and more time asking how today’s decisions are shaping its role in our lives.

Watch the recap:

Watch the full event:

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