The richest 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 surefire way they won’t succeed is if we stop them.
Many today don’t get further than seeing AI as a boondoggle—a new shiny object for techno-capitalists to sink their cash into as we barrel toward climate disaster. Obsolete takes those concerns seriously, but implores us to keep our eye on the ball: the attempt to render you obsolete.
The scale of their project has no real precedent. What we think 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 we’re letting it proceed virtually unabated. 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 takes on all three.
| Publisher | OR Books News Publisher |
| Author | Garrison Lovely |
| Country | USA |
| Publication Date | 09/04/2026 |
| Pages | 300 |
| Edition | first |
| Size | 14.53 x 2.34 x 21.67 cm |
| About the Author | Garrison Lovely is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, 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, |
| ISBN | ISBN 9781682196304 |