A deep dive into the Silicon Valley hivemind and a wake-up call for those don't register artificial intelligence as a real threat, Obsolete offers rare perspective on the AI industry’s goals, its psyche, and how we might rein it in. The biggest 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 thing that can stop them is us. Many people today don’t get further than regarding AI as a boondoggle—a new shiny shareholding for techno-capitalists to sink their cash into. Obsolete sees something more sinister, not to say scream-out-loud alarming: A tiny group of people, backed by the richest companies in the world, is attempting to render humanity obsolete. Their project is unimaginably vast in scope. What we previously thought 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 it is proceeding virtually unchallenged. 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 investigates each of these reasons for inaction and brings together key information from top researchers, advocates, and industry insiders to show why we really can’t afford to sit this one out.
