AI Safety, Alignment & Existential Risk
Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us—and How to Stop It
Garrison Lovely · 2026 · OR Books & Nation Books
A journalist's account of the AI industry's push to build systems that can replace human labor, covering the debate over AI risk and proposals for how to respond.
Summary
“Obsolete cuts through the hype and false binaries to answer all the AI questions you have, while raising some you probably aren't prepared for.”
The book examines the AI industry's spending on systems designed to replace human work. It addresses whether AI is a bubble or a transformative technology, and whether its main dangers are present-day harms or existential threats. The author treats those framings as false binaries and lays out proposals for how the public and policymakers could respond.
Summary based on the publisher's page ↗
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This book is sold in paperback, e-book and audiobook by OR Books & Nation Books. It isn't free to read online, but it may be available to borrow free with a library card.
About the author
Garrison Lovely
Garrison Lovely is known for his cover stories in The Nation and Jacobin, as well as writing in The New York Times, BBC, Nature, MIT Technology Review, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, TIME, The Guardian and The Verge. He was previously a reporter in residence at the Omidyar Network and writes Obsolete, a Substack on the political economy of artificial intelligence.
Source: Book's official site ↗