Obsolete or Irreplaceable? Garrison Lovely on Stopping the Race to Replace Human Labor

Nathan Labenz (0:00)

Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Garrison Lovely, freelance journalist based in Brooklyn and author of the new book Obsolete, the AI industry's trillion-dollar race to replace us and how to stop it. Against the backdrop of this summer's AI developments, with AIs having crossed the threshold from possibly scary one day to actually scary now, this is a very well-timed and potentially a very important book. For starters, it's abundantly clear that Garrison gets it. While he comes from a left-leaning political perspective and is largely writing for a left-leaning audience, there is not an ounce of AI cope in this book. Garrison himself is an active user of AI tools, and the book takes the company's stated goal of making something that is better than humans at cognitive work, at face value. Grappling head on with a very real chance that they might actually pull it off in the near future.

What's more, I think he does a great job of zeroing in on core issues. This is not everything bagel liberalism for AI, and neither is it an attempt to freeze the status quo in place forever. Rather, Garrison's goal is to capture the incredible upside promise of deep learning in domains like medicine and material science, while stopping companies from rushing into recursive self-improvement, or otherwise creating systems that render humans obsolete. At least that is, until the companies can convince experts that their plans are genuinely safe, and persuade the public that the results will indeed be beneficial. I also think Garrison does an admirable job of steelmanning and addressing core counterarguments. As you'll hear, while he's generally in favor of permissionless innovation, he gives good reasons to doubt that market discipline will be enough to constrain frontier AI companies, and also argues that a technical solution to the alignment problem will not be enough to deliver good outcomes overall. Knowing that Cognitive Revolution listeners do not need to be convinced to take AI seriously, we start with Garrison's personal AI usage, which by his own account has at times bordered on Claude psychosis, and also get his analysis of why the American left has been so slow to understand the stakes of AI development. From there, we go on to explore his positive vision for the future. Which includes a new social contract, which he calls the third new deal, that would begin to decouple individuals' right to a decent material existence from their ability to contribute to the economy. It also calls for an operation warp speed-like project built on government-sponsored prizes to accelerate cures for all diseases.

After that, we get Garrison's argument that ML researchers' collective power is currently nearing its peak and could quickly decline. His case for unionizing with the goal of demanding higher safety standards across frontier companies and his advice for any who are thinking about becoming whistleblowers. On politics, Garrison is realistic about the fact that there's a lot of misinformation currently swirling around data centers. But still, he's inclined to meet people where they are in an effort to build a big-tent coalition. On China, he makes a similar case to my own, arguing that the CCP values control and therefore absent extreme competitive pressure coming from the United States is not at all likely to rush into RSI.

Finally, we talk about the organization Irreplaceable, which aims to win a say, a stake, and a slowdown in the political arena, and to which Garrison is donating his book royalties. Plus, how interested listeners can get involved if they wish.

The bottom line for me is that while I'm still an AI enthusiast and eager early adopter by nature, and significantly less worried about labor market displacement than Garrison is, even though I do think it is likely to happen, I signed last year's FLI statement on superintelligence because I do firmly believe that racing to superintelligence via a recursive self-improvement-powered intelligence explosion would be a very bad idea. And at this point, with the possibility looking more and more realistic, I think Garrison might well be correct that it's time to put our less important disagreements aside and focus on building the coalitions needed to exercise political power.

With that, I hope you enjoy this discussion about who should get to decide the trajectory of frontier AI development with Garrison Lovely, author of Obsolete. Garrison Lovely, freelance journalist and author of the new book Obsolete, the AI industry's trillion-dollar race to replace us and how to stop it. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

Garrison Lovely (4:49)

Great to be here. Good to see you.

Nathan Labenz (4:51)

Great to see you.

I think this one might be a little bit different from some of the conversations that you're having to promote the book. As you're probably aware, I'm very deep down the AI rabbit hole personally. To the degree that I understand the audience of this podcast, I think the one thing that we all have in common is we're all AI obsessives. Some of us are enthusiasts, some of us are do-mers, some of us are both. I put myself in the both camp to at least a significant degree, and so there's a lot of the book that I think does a great job of just sketching out like, where are we in this whole AI phenomenon? Why should you take it seriously if you don't? I think a lot of that stuff you've probably focused on in some of your other conversations and does a lot of work with people who you need to convince to get over the hump and start paying attention to what's happening. I think in this forum, you don't really need to convince anybody that they should be taking AI seriously. And so I thought I'd come at it maybe from a little bit of a different angle and do maybe a little bit more of an ethnography or sociological study of the AI industry, because you're somebody who has been pretty deeply embedded in it. I don't know if you'd use that term, but definitely in the mix. And I think you have quite an interesting inside view as to what is going on. I think it might be a useful mirror to reflect back to people as you see the community that you've come to study so closely.