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 have crossed the threshold from possibly scary one day to actually scary now, this is a very well-timed and potentially very important book. First, it's abundantly clear that Garrison gets it – while he comes from a leftist 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 companies' stated goal of making something that is better than humans at cognitive work at face value, and grapples head-on with the very real chance that they might actually pull it off in the near future. Second, I think he does a great job of zeroing in on core issues. This is not everything bagel liberalism for AI, nor 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 such as medicine and material science, while stopping companies from rushing into Recursive Self Improvement or otherwise creating systems that render humans Obsolete, at least until the companies can convince experts that their plans are genuinely safe and persuade the public that the results will indeed be beneficial. And finally, I think Garrison does an admirable job of steel-manning 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 that a technical solution to the alignment problem will be enough to deliver good outcomes overall. Knowing that Cognitive Revolution listeners don't need to be convinced to take AI seriously, we start with his personal AI usage – which by his own account has at times bordered on Claude psychosis –and his analysis of why the American left has been so slow to understand the stakes of AI development, and then 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, and also an Operation Warp Speed like project, built on government sponsored prizes, to accelerate Cures for All diseases. From there, we get Garrison's argument that ML researchers' collective power is currently near its peak but 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 real about the fact that there's a lot of misinformation currently swirling around datacenters, but inclined to meet people where they are in an effort to build a big tent coalition. And on China, he makes a similar case to my own, arguing that the CCP values control and is therefore, absent extreme competitive pressure, 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, and how interested listeners can get involved. 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, even though I do think it's 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 that 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.
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Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution,
Nathan Labenz