OBSOLETE: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us―and How to Stop It, BOO!!

OBSOLETE: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us―and How to Stop It
GARRISON LOVELY
O/R Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The biggest companies in history are racing to build a machine that replaces human labor—all of it. And, as this provocative new book insists, the only thing that can stop them is us.

Many people today don’t get further than regarding AI as a boondoggle—a new shiny shareholding for techno-capitalists to sink their cash into. Obsolete sees something more sinister, not to say scream-out-loud alarming: A tiny group of people, backed by the richest companies in the world, is attempting to render humanity obsolete.

Their project is unimaginably vast in scope. What we previously thought of as big—the Gilded Age monopolies, the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program—doesn’t even come close to capturing its size. Almost none of us want this vast transformation to succeed. Yet it is proceeding virtually unchallenged. Why? Because we don’t know it’s happening, we don’t believe it will work, or we don’t think we can stop it.

Obsolete investigates each of these reasons for inaction and brings together key information from top researchers, advocates, and industry insiders to show why we really can’t afford to sit this one out.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Pause your reflexive eyerolling at the topic of AI's existential hsrms for a moment. Before acting on your "I am SO.SICK. of this scare-tactic crap!" and scrolling away, look at the author's bio as provided by the publisher:

Garrison Lovely is an AI expert and freelance journalist based in Brooklyn. In 2025, he was identified by the Pulitzer Center {on Crisis Reporting} as an AI journalist worth following. Lovely is known for his cover stories in The Nation ("Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower") and Jacobin ("Can Humanity Survive AI?"), as well as writing in The New York Times, BBC, Nature, MIT Technology Review, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, TIME, The Guardian, The Verge, and elsewhere. He was previously a Reporter in Residence at the Omidyar Network.

This is a very serious person's resume. Author Lovely is, for my money, more credible on the subject at hand because of his "Road to Damascus" moment while working for McKinsey. His evident chops in journalistic thinking as applied to the social issues raised by new, fast-developing technologies mean that he puts topics into understandable combinations. He treats the reader as you would an intelligent non-expert, going to the trouble of explaining his parallelisms. It gives the anxious reader a chance to see unsensationally why the relationships of technology to humanity are developing the way they are.

When heading into a frontier area of science, technology, and culture, some degree of fuzziness is inevitable. Author Lovely distinguishes among who is being fuzzy of necessity (techologists,researchers on creating AI technology), who is using fuzziness to grift (banksters, CEOs), and who's using fuzziness to distract everyone else from a social-restructuring agenda (tech bros, Aynholes, fascists, et alii). It's a big part of this book just to explain who's got this technology in its sights to misuse it for appalling and unprecedented control over us, the ordinary people.

I was sobered, alarmed, and angered by the sheer scope of the latter group's ambitions for controlling us. It truly is unprecedented what AI by its mere existence as an attainable technology has elicited from the base of these people's very base personalities, and let's not shy away fro the calling it the darkness of their souls. It pays to remember, when contemplating this subject, that "They" are not all the way to true AI...yet. There are institutions and laws we can enact that will slow down application of AI in the real world, and that must be part of any concerned person's agenda when voting on Tuesday, 3 November 2026 in the US.

But the fight to save our literal freedom as human beings can't be thought of as complete until we come up with ways, enforceable, verifiable, visible ways to use this technology...we can't turn it off, as proved by the hugging-face incident, which Open AI itself (see article at link) thinks is a problem and admits to the validity of people's concerns, demonstrated. One of the most worrying yet most heartening sections of the book is "Too Big to Guardrail". It outlines the complexity of oversight on the frontiers of society and technology. Author Lovely proposes using US anti-trust laws to accomplish the purpose. I'll confess that I think y'all won't read the details, I had to force myself to because the amount of googling I had to do was breathtaking, so let me put it in a nutshell for you: I'm on his side, and following his note-links never took me to any weird, out-there places with fringe ideas. Everything Author Lovely proposes can be argued from serious establishment principles to be implemented in existing frameworks of law and precedent.

That means it could realistically be sold to the pooh-bahs of the world. No factor of this argument as he made it heartened me more. No hectoring, out-there (but correct IMO) newfangled thinking needed. The Economic Royalists will fight dirty, hard, and long to stop anything from getting in the way of their greed being primary to the world's societies running...but the way Author Lovely lays out to defeat them can work.

We need to gain power in US politics, yes; but we need to get people concerned about the actual survival of people, not only societal structures, to support this agenda. Author Lovely is sharp-tongued in his criticisms of both US political parties, with truth and justice on his side. I think, however, many readers on both sides of this divide will switch off because the tone he uses is strong. Advocating for change is never effective when done politely, far as I know. Please look past any hurt feelings to see what is presented, and decide if it is a solution you can support.

Then it's time to do the work of supporting it.