The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI
At your speed≈ 5 hrs
Pages240
Audiobook≈ 8 hrs
Every reading time on the site updates to your pace. Page counts are an estimate, so treat the hours as a good guide, not a stopwatch.
240 pages works out to roughly 72,000 words. At an average 250 words a minute that is 5 hrs — a day's reading.
Readers on Hardcover rate it 4.18 out of 5, from 74 ratings.
Worth-it score 7.5/10 — Worth the time. Readers 7.4 (Hardcover's 4.18★ from 74 ratings) + length 0.1 = 7.5. How the score works →
How long does it take to read The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI?
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is 240 pages, or roughly 72,000 words. How long that takes depends on how fast you read:
| Your pace | Words per minute | Time to finish |
|---|---|---|
| Slow | 175 | 7 hrs |
| Average | 250 | 5 hrs |
| Fast | 400 | 3 hrs |
Estimated at about 300 words per page. Most adults read between 200 and 300 words a minute — set your own pace and every time on the site adjusts. Prefer to listen? At a typical narration pace of 150 words a minute the audiobook runs about 8 hrs — an estimate from the word count, since narrators vary.
Common questions
- How long does it take to read The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI?
- About 5 hrs at an average reading speed of 250 words per minute. The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI runs 240 pages, roughly 72,000 words — so at a slower 175 wpm it is nearer 7 hrs, and at 400 wpm closer to 3 hrs.
- How many pages is The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI?
- 240 pages, which is about 72,000 words and 5 hrs of reading. Editions vary, so we use the figure two of our sources agree on.
- Is The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI worth reading?
- We score it 7.5 out of 10 for the time it takes — worth the time. Readers on Hardcover rate it 4.18 out of 5 from 74 ratings, which counts for 7.4; at about 5 hrs at an average pace it earns +0.1 for being short.
- How long is The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI audiobook?
- About 8 hrs, estimated from the 72,000 words at a typical narration pace of 150 words a minute. Real editions vary by narrator, usually by well under an hour.
From the publisher
In modern tech parlance, a centaur is a person who is able to use technology to be a better, more productive version of themself. A reverse centaur is a person who is forced by technology to work at an inhuman 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. The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is not another anti-AI screed. Cory Doctorow uses AI in his work every day. As a creative person, he has no moral or dogmatic issue with AI—he thinks the technology is useful, even exciting, and full of potential. And yet. AI has arrived surrounded by unprecedented hype driven by a tech industry desperate to maintain its unprecedented valuation based on its own promises of endless financial growth. Despite the fact that almost all of AI’s real-world implementations have proved underwhelming, AI is projected 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. For Doctorow, it is imperative to see through that hype to the real story, to understand the technology not just for what it does, but for who it does it to and who it does it for. From that point of view, the story of AI is indeed dramatic and unprecedented, having generated an investment bubble so big that it endangers the entire world economy. 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.
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