In a discussion about his new book, *The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI*, author Cory Doctorow defines a "reverse centaur" as a "human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine," citing examples such as warehouse workers forced to urinate in water bottles to meet algorithm-set targets and future workers in self-driving trucks on minimum wage. Doctorow criticizes AI leaders like Elon Musk, who called AI the "single greatest threat to human civilisation," Sam Altman, who said it will "most likely lead to the end of the world," and Dario Amodei, who forecast AI would see humans as "a resource to be exploited." Doctorow argues that AI is a "conjuring trick," a machine good at predicting words that we wrongly invest with intentionality, and that "hallucination" describes not the AI's errors but our tendency to impute a writer to a "word salad."