Obsolete

“A disquieting debut… provides enough evidence to make even enthusiastic AI boosters want to burn their electronics… an unsettling perspective on the perils of allowing AI to develop without oversight.” —Publishers Weekly

“One of the smartest thinkers there is on how, exactly, to conceptualize AI’s risks for humanity … he transcends the warring tribes that are making it hard to clearly apprehend all of the problems posed by frontier AI development.” —Vox, Marina Bolotnikova

“Obsolete does something both useful and challenging. It provides an illuminating snapshot of the current state of the debate on AI while proposing some sensible ideas on how to handle a technology that threatens to cause a lot of harm and entrench even greater inequality across the globe if left unchecked.” —Jacobin, Christopher Webb

“The best book I’ve read on AI. It’s supremely timely, it takes no prisoners, and Sam Altman will hate it” —Luke Kemp, Cambridge existential risk scholar and author of Goliath’s Curse

“Thoughtful, well-reasoned … and absolutely terrifying. I’m glad I read it. Obsolete is a crucial blueprint.” —AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically

“Garrison Lovely is exactly what the left needs at this moment in technological history.” —Robert Wright, author of Nonzero and Why Buddhism Is True

“If you are worried about AI, this timely and engaging book tells you that you should be—because Silicon Valley has made choices that should indeed worry us all.” —Daron Acemoğlu, Nobel laureate in economics and author of Why Nations Fail

“A monumental work on the implications of AI for popular democracy—what it means for the rest of us that a few trillion dollar companies are trying to build machines that can replace human labor. It’s incisive, well-sourced, and jarring. Pick it up!” —Cassie Pritchard, labor organizer

“I can’t recommend Obsolete highly enough. It will be the most important book of 2026.” —Greg Conti, associate professor of politics at Princeton and editor at large of Compact Magazine

“A well-researched exposé on Big Tech’s quest for Universal Labor-Replacing Machines and the propaganda used to justify it.” —Max Tegmark, professor of physics at MIT and author of Life 3.0

“Obsolete is funny, furious, and correct: Silicon Valley promised us tools, but is building replacements. Read it before your replacement does.” —Roman V. Yampolskiy, associate professor in computer science and engineering at the University of Louisville and author of AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable

“An invaluable primer on AI’s ins and outs, and an urgent warning about the threat its corporate boosterists’ plans pose to democracy and civilization itself.” —Luke Savage, author of The Dead Center

“Garrison Lovely is one of our best researchers and thinkers. His work is an antidote to fuzzy thinking, essential for understanding what the real risks of AI are and how they can be dealt with effectively.” —Nathan Robinson, editor of Current Affairs

“A deeply researched cutting-edge exposition of the grim situation humanity finds itself in with respect to AI, and what we can do about it … even-handed while expressing a strong and correct view of what is happening.” —Anthony Aguirre, theoretical physicist and executive director of the Future of Life Institute

Garrison Lovely is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including cover stories for The Nation (“Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower”) and Jacobin (“Can Humanity Survive AI?”). He has also written for The New York Times, BBC, Nature, MIT Technology Review, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, TIME, The Guardian, and The Verge, among others.

Lovely is the author of Obsolete, an independent publication focused on the economics and geopolitics of artificial intelligence. His reporting has been translated into five languages and has been cited by outlets such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and ProPublica. He was previously a reporter in residence at the Omidyar Network.

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