Photograph © Varun Hegde 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, The Verge, and elsewhere. He was previously a Reporter in Residence at the Omidyar Network and is the author of Obsolete, an independent publication on the economics and geopolitics of artificial intelligence. Lovely's work has been translated into five languages and cited by the New Yorker, The Atlantic, ProPublica, and others.

A tiny group of people, backed by the best-resourced organizations in the world, is attempting to render humanity obsolete. Not every participant in the project even believes this is possible, but the effort's vanguard has defined itself through its faith in the transformative potential of machine intelligence and its willingness to forge ahead despite the grave risks it so routinely acknowledges.

The industry’s ultimate goal and the most controversial term in this space—artificial general intelligence—conjures up images of a new type of mind that might think like our own. But it would not. And “AGI” keeps the focus on what it might be, when the attention should really be on what it might do. It would be better to understand what companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are trying to build not as a new type of brain, but rather a new type of machine, one that doesn’t make products or services, but produces labor itself.

Why? Humans—and human-derived labor—are messy. Humanity has always been constrained because humans are the constraint. It takes a long time to make more of us, to educate us, to feed and shelter us. We can only do so much. For centuries, automation has allowed owners to substitute some capital for labor—the tractor for the scythe, the loom for the needle—but only to a point.

Now, machine intelligence promises the potential to cut out that last constraint: us. This obliterates the one fundamental limit and opens up new worlds of possibility. Many of them, as we will see, are terrifying.

The leaders of what, in this book, I’ll call the Obsoleting Project may contest this framing, offering some bromides about how AI will augment human work or how we’ll simply find new jobs to do. But their stated goals are to create systems that so clearly surpass our abilities that we will have little hope of competing. OpenAI makes this explicit, defining AGI as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.”

Many are skeptical that the Obsoleting Project will succeed. Perhaps you are too, and I don’t blame you. Often, seemingly equally credentialed people are making opposite claims about the present and future of the technology. But the Project’s scale has no real precedent. What we think of as big—Gilded Age monopolies, the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program—doesn’t even come close to capturing its size. It’s worth looking carefully at whether it has a chance of succeeding.

As with all new technologies, the Obsoleting Machine, if it works as intended, will create winners and losers. If you’d like to double down on today’s biggest winners—the ones developing it, the capital-owners, and the bosses, along with the nations and fortunes large enough to buy a seat at the table—then bring on the acceleration. The Obsoleting Project is, essentially, an inequality engine, aspirationally turning unfathomable amounts of capital into other people’s unemployment, all to maximize value for shareholders. The crowning irony: the Project was built on the backs of humanity’s collective labor, appropriated wholesale—our shared inheritance plundered to create private fortunes.

Understanding these dynamics—who wins, who loses, and why—is essential to grasping what's actually happening right now, and what might happen next. Other books have been written about machines that might one day think. This is the first book about machines that might one day make labor.

Photograph © Varun Hegde 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, The Verge, and elsewhere. He was previously a Reporter in Residence at the Omidyar Network and is the author of Obsolete, an independent publication on the economics and geopolitics of artificial intelligence. Lovely's work has been translated into five languages and cited by the New Yorker, The Atlantic, ProPublica, and others.

A tiny group of people, backed by the best-resourced organizations in the world, is attempting to render humanity obsolete. Not every participant in the project even believes this is possible, but the effort's vanguard has defined itself through its faith in the transformative potential of machine intelligence and its willingness to forge ahead despite the grave risks it so routinely acknowledges.

The industry’s ultimate goal and the most controversial term in this space—artificial general intelligence—conjures up images of a new type of mind that might think like our own. But it would not. And “AGI” keeps the focus on what it might be, when the attention should really be on what it might do. It would be better to understand what companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are trying to build not as a new type of brain, but rather a new type of machine, one that doesn’t make products or services, but produces labor itself.

Why? Humans—and human-derived labor—are messy. Humanity has always been constrained because humans are the constraint. It takes a long time to make more of us, to educate us, to feed and shelter us. We can only do so much. For centuries, automation has allowed owners to substitute some capital for labor—the tractor for the scythe, the loom for the needle—but only to a point.

Now, machine intelligence promises the potential to cut out that last constraint: us. This obliterates the one fundamental limit and opens up new worlds of possibility. Many of them, as we will see, are terrifying.

The leaders of what, in this book, I’ll call the Obsoleting Project may contest this framing, offering some bromides about how AI will augment human work or how we’ll simply find new jobs to do. But their stated goals are to create systems that so clearly surpass our abilities that we will have little hope of competing. OpenAI makes this explicit, defining AGI as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.”

Many are skeptical that the Obsoleting Project will succeed. Perhaps you are too, and I don’t blame you. Often, seemingly equally credentialed people are making opposite claims about the present and future of the technology. But the Project’s scale has no real precedent. What we think of as big—Gilded Age monopolies, the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program—doesn’t even come close to capturing its size. It’s worth looking carefully at whether it has a chance of succeeding.

As with all new technologies, the Obsoleting Machine, if it works as intended, will create winners and losers. If you’d like to double down on today’s biggest winners—the ones developing it, the capital-owners, and the bosses, along with the nations and fortunes large enough to buy a seat at the table—then bring on the acceleration. The Obsoleting Project is, essentially, an inequality engine, aspirationally turning unfathomable amounts of capital into other people’s unemployment, all to maximize value for shareholders. The crowning irony: the Project was built on the backs of humanity’s collective labor, appropriated wholesale—our shared inheritance plundered to create private fortunes.

Understanding these dynamics—who wins, who loses, and why—is essential to grasping what's actually happening right now, and what might happen next. Other books have been written about machines that might one day think. This is the first book about machines that might one day make labor.