THE REVERSE CENTAUR'S GUIDE TO LIFE AFTER AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late, latest Doctorow klaxon

THE REVERSE CENTAUR'S GUIDE TO LIFE AFTER AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late
CORY DOCTOROW
MCD x FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Whether you want to criticize, kill, or use AI, you have to get through the hype and uncover the real story.

Start with labor: in automation theory, a centaur is a person who chooses to use technology to help them do the things that matter to them. A reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a helper for a machine, at an inhuman, machine 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. As Doctorow says: it's not enough to ask what the technology does—we have to understand who it's doing it for and who it's doing it to.

The intended audience for AI hype isn't the people who are forced to use AI. The AI show is a performance staged for bosses and investors. Investment bankers claim AI will 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.

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. When the AI bubble bursts, what will we salvage? Is there something in the wreckage that everyday people will find useful? 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The argument I myownself have against "AI" (which isn't and won't be intelligent the way humans are) is financial. There is an AI bubble running right now that's gifted us the utterly brummagem world's first trillionaire. Look a little more deeply into SpaceX's IPO, you'll see how much of it's built on AI (which was partially trained on stolen US Government data via the little dickweeds from DOGE).

It really looks a lot like a gigantic pump-and-dump scheme when one reads Author Cory's work as digested and documented in this scathing book. He's been in the trenches reporting on tech matters for what feels like forever. Enshittification, anyone? It must make the guy a crazy person to present his deeply researched, well sourced and informed conclusions to general apathy. It lights fires under some of us, my dude, so please don't stop!

Especially relevant to my eagerness to share this book with all y'all is the centering of "AI"'s intended impact on labor. It's Author Cory's clear statement that the bubble's partly fueled by tech scum's intense desire to destroy any power of workers over their work, the conditions and rewards thereof, and the very nature of employment as reconstituted post-Great Depression. Wealth inequality is something "AI" is designed to entrench.

I hope a skilled human copyeditor went over this book after my DRC was created. There are some amusing errors of fact that, honestly, trouble me a bit, eg referring to trustbusting under FDR instead of his distant cousin TR. Some other errors niggled at me, but...well...consider the subject matter, maybe these sorts of issues are proof positive of the validity of Author Cory's thesis...?

I'm very serious when I say this: reading this book can give you tools to manage your personal interactions with the "AI" being rammed down our unwilling throats to further enrich the riches scum ever to rise to the controlling positions they're now it. It can do this by alerting the complacent or avoidant reader to what is actually at risk in this economic bubble's inflation.

An easy prose style delivers a hard-to-fathom message. It's one of my favorite reads of 2026. Please get one and read it. Libraries are very likely to have copies in stock now. Of course, if you can, making the purchase for your own shelves or devices is the best way to support Author Cory in his quest to wake us all up to the threats...and the opportunities knowing they're there present...to our essential human nature.

THE TESLA FILES: A Whistleblower, a Leak, a Fight for Truth: The Inside Story of Musk's Empire, what it says on the tin

THE TESLA FILES: A Whistleblower, a Leak, a Fight for Truth: The Inside Story of Musk's Empire
SÖNKE IWERSEN & MICHAEL VERFÜRDEN
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A whistleblower.
A 100BG-leak of confidential internal documents.

This is the story of the fight to expose the truth of Tesla.

Elon Musk is one of the wealthiest people in the world. Tesla made him a 300-times billionaire. Starlink turned him into a force in global conflicts. X became his personal megaphone, stoking political turmoil at the touch of a button. With SpaceX, he aims to conquer the stars.

But a whistleblower, a 100GB-leak of confidential Tesla documents and two investigative journalists reveal the frightening truth behind the façade: an unusually high number of workplace accidents in Musk’s factories, dangerous errors in Tesla's autopilot software, a culture of fear and deception, and countless broken promises.

Investigative journalists Sönke Iwersen and Michael Verfürden take readers behind the shiny surface of Tesla. Through their chilling analysis of internal Tesla data and court documents set alongside the astonishing first-hand accounts of employees, customers and their bereaved families, The Tesla Files reveals a corporation in crisis. At its heart a billionaire who truly believes the world is his for the taking.

The definitive exposé of the world’s most powerful businessman and the rise and fall of his empire.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Systemic indifference to the privacy, the rights, really the importance of anyone not themselves is a hallmark of organizations connected to Muskolini. We saw that in the brazen theft of explicit and monetizable government data on taxpayers, for a start, by DOGE...never a Federal department, never authorized to do anything by the only legitimate authority, Congress, to act on behalf of the Federal government...that somehow has never been talked up by our media watchdogs in the US. Funny how Penguin Random House published this book in the UK but not the US, where a really small indie publisher brought it out; odd that a pair of German investigative journalists did this reporting, not anyone from a major US paper; and most interesting there's no translator credited anywhere in the book.

I'm sure the authors are sterling of character but I beg leave to presume they're not fluent enough in English to produce prose that does not raise my "say what now?" eyebrow. Deference to a famous, nay infamous lawsuit-filer with a serious need to control his public image? It can't be proven by me.

The facts as presented in this book are...let's stop at poor optics. It is definitely an exposé. I am inclined, on my own behalf, to agree with the bald statement the whistleblower is quoted as making in the book: "Elon Musk is evil." This being a matter of opinion it surprised me the authors left it in...until I read about Tesla's obscenely negligent handling of customer data, which you must agree to sign over to them when you buy one of their cars.

Twitter-destroyin', Starlink-abusin', money-hoardin' immigrant that he is, he's part of the culture we're living in, and it is my sincere hope that he, along with the Epstein-files-dwelling serial sexual abusers in his socioeconomic class, will be served justice before long.

A boy can dream.

WHO KNOWS YOU BY HEART, layered storytelling...in the Satanic second person

WHO KNOWS YOU BY HEART
C.J. FARLEY
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Part social thriller, part modern love story, Who Knows You by Heart is a sly, witty, and endlessly discussable tale of Big Tech, new money, relationships, race, and discovering what’s real in an age of artificial intelligence.

Octavia Crenshaw, a Jamaican-American coder living in Manhattan, is broke, burned out, and haunted by her parents’ deaths. Desperate to pay off some debts, she ditches her nonprofit job for a high-paying gig at Eustachian Inc., a Big Tech company that specializes in audio entertainment. Language, communication, human connection—these are the markets Eustachian wants to revolutionize...and dominate.

Octavia finds herself swept up in the world of the Tech Titans, with its lure of instant riches and its seemingly limitless future. But as one of Eustachian’s very few Black employees, Octavia is uncomfortably aware of things that seem to escape her unexplained tech glitches, cryptic remarks, a mysterious secret floor in the corporation’s gleaming headquarters.

But she sets her suspicions aside when she’s recruited by another Black coder—the infuriating but attractive Walcott—to collaborate on a secret project code-named Zion. Zion is a new kind of AI-powered storytelling, one that’s programmed to be free from the racist and sexist biases that plague other AI products. Zion could launch Eustachian into a bold new future and make its developers super rich while righting all kinds of injustices. Octavia and Walcott’s excitement over their creation sets off romantic sparks between the two of them, until they discover a toxic secret about their employer—something that they can’t unlearn, or overlook, but must overcome.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Told in second person, so no possibility for anything above four of five stars exists. A Columbia educated (as we're reminded often) Black woman succumbs to the lure of tech money in this romance-tinged technothriller. It's very much a game of two halves, as the beginning sets up the circumstances of Octavia's decision to accept cold capitalist reality and take a high-paying, not likely to be fulfilling job in order to buy her way out of debt...much of which was inherited from her mother, thus involving Octavia in debt peonage.Fortunately for her a megacompany, Eustachian, Inc.'s, testing algorithm taps her as A Talent.

As witty, obsevant Octavia spends time in Eustachian, Inc., we get the deeply uneasy sense of "offness" that a thriller needs to make it exciting. The author chooses to make this a very extended part of the book, not igniting the thriller part until Walcott, the love interest/cospirator with excellent aims, appears far too near the halfway point. This is also when the language shifts registers as technobabble (for all of me, anyway) predominates from here on out. I perked up, though, because the stated aim of these two Black folks in a lily-white tech company staffed by tech bros is to subvert the systemic racism and misogyny from within using coding skills.

As this is exactly what I think keeps Aynholes awake at night and causes them to refuse DEI anything with all their might, I was so down with this! Especially since I was being tenderized by the (for white people) immersion into Black culture, use of Black contributions to the world, and centering of a Black woman in a plot about confronting and subverting racism and misogyny.

You'll have noticed the incomplete fourth star. I was a bit surprised by Author Farley's complete absence of Asian characters in a novel centering race-based prejudice. Historical reckoning with racism and combating is perpetuation is very much incomplete without more inclusion. Still, It's not fatal as flaws go, nowhere near as guaranteed to put me off as Satanic second-person narration.

I would've relegated this novel to a short review until I got to the final chapter. A summation of the extreme dangers inherent in AI's development *at*all* left me slightly winded from the emotional ooof as the gut-punch landed.

For that alone I hope you'll read the book. (I won't forgive the second-personning waterboard torture, though.)

THE INTELLIGENCE EXPLOSION: When AI Beats Humans at Everything, what it says on the tin

THE INTELLIGENCE EXPLOSION: When AI Beats Humans at Everything
JAMES BARRAT
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: With the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence, both existential fears and uncritical enthusiasm for AI systems have surged. In this era of unprecedented technological growth, understanding the profound impacts of AI — both positive and negative — is more crucial than ever.

In The Intelligence Explosion, James Barrat, a leading technology expert, equips readers with the tools to navigate the complex and often chaotic landscape of modern AI. This compelling book dives deep into the challenges posed by generative AI, exposing how tech companies have built systems that are both error-prone and impossible to fully interpret.

Through insightful interviews with AI pioneers, Barrat highlights the unstable trajectory of AI development, showcasing its potential for modest benefits and catastrophic consequences. Bold, eye-opening, and essential, The Intelligence Explosion is a must-read for anyone grappling with the realities of the technological revolution.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: In non-fiction publishing, there is...or was...a fearsome thing called "omigawd I've just bought a magazine article blown up to book size. That is this book.

Trenchant, of-the-moment analyses do not survive well...anyone here old enough to remember Faith Popcorn? Shere Hite? Laurence Peter? Peter Drucker?...all very famously took modern trends, extrapolated on them, and came to conclusions that, when wrong, now make us chuckle, ans when right, are largely so ingrained they seem useless as "predictions" (see Laurence Peter's eponymous Principle). We have here one of the latest in that distinguishing lineage. (No, that's not a typo.)

The arguably bad actors in Barrat's analysis are, in my view, much much worse than he paints them. He thinks hubris and greed are enough to explain their actions; most of them are malevolent and malign, to my way of thinking. To be scrupulously fair, Barrat presents some possible positive uses of what's being called "generative AI" which, well, I think overstates the present state of LLM development. There is an argument to be made that the danger of this system's rapid adoption is that it is nowhere near finished in its refinements of its capabilities; in fact, the real threat may be the black-box problem that has legions of experts in their various fields extremely jittery.

As another voice in a very august chorus, members whose names are very niche knowledge but the venues platforming them are the likes of Scientific American, ScienceNews, and The Harvard Business Review, so hardly low-wattage luminaries, I wonder what Barrat thought he was going to add. As his precise coeval (we share a birth month and year, though I only wish I was as handsome as he is) I understand why he wanted to sound a klaxon instead of ringing a tocsin. The stakes Society is sleepwalking over a cliff holding are existential. There will already need to be a multigenerational project with focus and passion and funding needed to repair the damage already done in pursuit of these tech scum's vile agenda. I do not see that beginning in my own lifetime. I was wrong about how fast the rotten, soulless enterprise moved forward, so may I be wrong about how much damage it's already done...in the better-than-I-thought direction, please.

As a documentary filmmaker by trade, Barrat is used to using repetition as a major technique to get people to really hear him. Books, and he's written two (one about AI as threat in 2013) before, do not benefit the same way from that technique of reinforcement. It acts to annoy many of the readers who are most likely to agree with and amplify his trenchant, urgent message (me).

I'm afraid that the overall experience of reading this book was one akin to chatting with a fellow catastrophist whose affect on me was to have me agreeing but wanting to change the subject. YMMV and the topic is important enough to lead me to recommend you read the sample made available to see if you vibe with his prose.