Doctorow tells ABC AI hype is inevitabilism, not inevitability

Cory Doctorow has a new label for the pitch that the current AI wave will remake every job whether we like it or not, and it is not a compliment. In an interview with the ABC, the novelist and activist calls the framing 'inevitabilism,' which he defines as 'the insistence that there is only one conceivable way to do things, and any problems you're experiencing aren't anyone's fault, they're just inescapable reality.'

The vocabulary matters because Doctorow is a fluent packager of tech critique, and his coinages have a habit of sticking; 'enshittification' became the Macquarie Dictionary's word of the year in 2024. His new book, 'The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI,' argues that AI is not a revolution but a financial bubble that will eventually burst. A centaur is meant to combine the best of horse and human. A reverse centaur, in his telling, combines the worst of both.

Two things follow if you take the frame seriously. Executives selling AI as an unstoppable force are running what Doctorow calls 'a cheap bully's trick,' which reframes the pitch as a marketing choice rather than a description of the physical world. And the interesting question shifts from when the model gets better to what he calls the more important fact about any technology, which is who it does it for and who it does it to.

The honest caveat is that this was an interview timed to his visit to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas and The Wheeler Centre in Australia, not a forecast with dates or named companies attached, so treat the bubble claim as argument rather than a call on timing. What the reporting does not give you is the operational picture of what a 'life after AI' actually looks like inside a firm that already has these tools embedded.

The part that stuck with me is his answer to the softest question in the interview, about where he still finds joy online. He points at 'weird and gnarly communities, some of which are on shitty websites,' and at YouTube. For a critic this practiced at the dark side of platforms, that is a useful reminder that the counter-move to inevitabilism is not doom, it is paying attention to the corners of the internet that were never going to be optimised for anyone.