Book Review: Obsolete

Book review: Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us? and How to Stop It, by Garrison Lovely. Obsolete is a strange book. It’s mostly good, but the quality varies a good deal. Lovely is well informed about concerns that AI might kill us all, and doesn’t dispute those concerns. Yet he focuses much more on more ordinary concerns, in particular excessive concentration of power. He is somewhat successful at portraying mundane harms of this year, and longer term risks (will AI kill us all in the 2030s), as similar problems. I usually cringe at such efforts, but Lovely is quite good at defusing the tensions between those two types of concern. E.g. he discusses AI-assisted political coups by a CEO such as Musk in a way that sounds almost realistic using current AI, while also warning about dramatic increases in that risk as AI becomes more powerful. Most of the book is written for a pretty broad audience. I’m annoyed that he added in a modest number of gratuitous culture war quips that will repel some Republicans. He mitigates that a little by also complaining about widespread corruption among leading Democrats, but many Republicans won’t read far enough to notice that. Obsolete also contains a few distracting sections on topics such as how to improve drug development. That passage would make an excellent blog post, but feels quite out of place in the middle of policy advice for dealing with AI risks. Two examples of Lovely describing his concerns well: He answers the “can’t you just unplug it” question by pointing to OpenAI’s inability to unplug a rogue CEO in November 2023. He shows the Andy Jones chart of the horse population with a nearly 90% drop between 1930 and 1950. > For the first 120 years of that steady improvement, horses didn’t notice at all. … Progress in engines was steady. Equivalence to horses was sudden. China Lovely is correct to report that AI companies aren’t very good at keeping secrets, but he overstates how much that