Garrison Lovely

About

Garrison Lovely is a freelance journalist who covers the political economy of artificial intelligence, with bylines in outlets such as The New York Times, Nature, TIME and The Verge. He writes the Substack Obsolete and is promoting his book Obsolete, released September 29, 2026, which argues that AI companies are racing to build machines that replace human labor and that this race can be stopped.

Known for

• Author of Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us, and How to Stop It, released September 29, 2026
• Writes Obsolete, a Substack of reporting and analysis on the political economy of the AI race
• Freelance AI reporting published in The New York Times, Nature, MIT Technology Review, TIME, The Guardian and others
• Former Reporter in Residence at the Omidyar Network, and named by the Pulitzer Center in 2025 as an AI journalist worth following

Key points

• Argues that the effort to build labor-replacing AI should be halted until there is strong public buy-in and scientific consensus that it can be done safely, while beneficial uses like drug discovery continue
• Argues that the central threat of AI is the replacement of human labor rather than the destruction of humanity
• Argues that cheap machine cognition ends practical obscurity, making old statements, recordings and records searchable and usable for surveillance at scale

• AI: What Is to Be Done? Plus Protest Under AssaultStart Making Sense (The Nation)Oct 2026
• Will AI Make Humans Obsolete? (Robert Wright & Garrison Lovely)Robert Wright's NonzeroOct 2026
• Will AI Make Human Labor Obsolete? with Garrison LovelyNew Books in Public PolicyOct 2026
• Obsolete or Irreplaceable? Garrison Lovely on Stopping the Race to Replace Human LaborThe Cognitive RevolutionSep 2026
• Cheap cognition and the end of practical obscurity, with Garrison LovelyComplex Systems with Patrick McKenzieJul 2026