Obsolete

About the Book

Depending on who you ask, artificial intelligence is our salvation or our doom; an overhyped, bigoted bullshit artist or the ticket to immortality and utopian abundance; just another tech fad or the last invention we need ever make. The AI discourse is confusing, messy, and frustrating. But the technology — and our response to it — will shape the future, whether or not we're part of the conversation.

Obsolete is for those who are interested in learning more about AI, but are unsure of where to start and who to believe. They may feel intimidated by the technical jargon, put off by dry and abstract prose, or skeptical of the loudest voices on the issue (like Elon Musk and Sam Altman). Obsolete will introduce readers to the basics of AI, the idea that it could lead to human extinction, the roiling three-sided debate surrounding extinction fears, and the people and companies trying to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) — that which can outwit humans across the board. The book will grapple with the core arguments animating the AI debates, which are, by turns, uncritically parroted and unduly dismissed. It will also cut through industry hype while seriously entertaining the implications of AGI.

The risk that AGI could result in our extinction is being recognized by a significant and growing number of leading AI researchers, industrialists, and policymakers, along with the wider public. Existential risk from AI has been explored in other books, but Obsolete will be the first to center its analysis on how both capitalist and great power competition make AI more dangerous.

Obsolete will also tackle questions like: Can machines actually outsmart humanity? If so, when could that happen? If AGI is possible, is it inevitable? Why are people trying to build a technology they claim could end the world? Is the idea of AI-driven extinction the product of a big tech conspiracy aiming to hype the technology and control its regulation? Why has the left mostly ignored or dismissed existential risk from AI? Why do some powerful techies welcome human extinction? How could AI enable stable authoritarian regimes? How could killer robots reshape war and the balance of power? What do China and the US want from AI? And why has it become the front line of their brewing Cold War? And finally: What can and should we do about it?

About the Author

I'm Garrison Lovely, a freelance journalist reporting on the intersection of economics, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. My writing has appeared in The New York Times, Nature, BBC, TIME, The Thomson Reuters Foundation, Foreign Policy, The Verge, The Guardian US, Vox, and many other outlets. I've written cover stories for The Nation and Jacobin, with my piece "Can Humanity Survive AI" leading to my current book deal. I'm also a Reporter in Residence at the Omidyar Network and publisher of Obsolete, a fast-growing Substack on AI.

My reporting and commentary on AI has been shared by the three "godfathers" of deep learning (Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton), noted AI critic Gary Marcus, Life 3.0 author Max Tegmark, and many others. I've spoken on AI at Harvard, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Fund for Alignment Research (FAR Labs).

My writing has been translated into 5 languages and cited dozens of times by mainstream outlets (including the New Yorker, NYT, The Atlantic, ProPublica, The Brookings Institution, The Guardian, Axios, and NY Magazine). My media appearances have received over 8 million combined views/listens, and my social media posts have gained over 18 million impressions.