Cory Doctorow warns AI bubble threatens index-fund savers

A new book review at The Tyee is worth reading before the next earnings cycle, because it puts a number on what an AI correction would actually cost people who never bought AI stock on purpose. Cory Doctorow's new book, *The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI* (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2026), argues we are in a bubble and it is going to pop soon.

The number that stays with you, cited by reviewer Crawford Kilian, is Doctorow's claim that seven giant AI companies account for 35 per cent of the U.S. stock market. That is the exposure. If those valuations compress, the damage does not stay contained to venture portfolios, it lands in index funds and, through them, in retirement accounts. Doctorow's frame for the earnings side is equally blunt, he cites an MIT study finding 95 per cent of commercial AI deployments 'fail with no measurable impact on profit,' and argues the underlying business 'simply can't make a profit, ever.'

He points at Nvidia's single-day loss in 2025, after China's DeepSeek release, as a preview, roughly two-thirds of a trillion dollars gone in one session. Two of his analytical hooks are worth borrowing even if you disagree with the prediction. A 'reverse centaur,' in his definition, is 'a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine,' the way social media users end up serving as ad targets. And 'inevitabilism' is the marketing move of insisting current AI is the only conceivable way to do things.

The honest caveat is that this is a book review, not a market call with a date, and it does not name the seven companies or say when the pop arrives. What the reporting does not give you is the trigger or the timeline. Doctorow's forward-looking claim is that a post-bubble world could still support beneficial, localized AI once the cloud surveillance model deflates. Any leader whose plan quietly assumes the top seven keep climbing might want to pressure-test that thesis before the market does it for them.