Not long ago, a close friend of mine, a software engineer, was discussing how his job role had changed in recent months as his company had moved to adopt an “AI-first approach.” He explained that this approach had altered his team’s dynamics. He told me how he now dreads one question more than any other, one that has become a refrain around the office: “Why don’t you just give it to Claude?” ‘It’ is usually a difficult engineering problem to solve, one that has stumped the team for a little while, or longer than a few minutes at least, often during a technical discussion that only a few years ago might have lasted well over an hour. Invariably, he will give the problem to Claude who, invariably, will produce an impressive solution within a few minutes. He doesn’t mind that Claude has provided him with a solution. He minds that those around him no longer understand him as an authority, as they once did. He minds that he now feels more or less fungible. Or perhaps, worse still, obsolete.

The concept of human obsolescence is one that Garrison Lovely takes seriously in his study Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us — and How to Stop It. Rather than approaching the subject through the eyes of workers on the ground (like other recent books on this topic, perhaps most notably Sarah O’Connor’s We Are Not Machines), Lovely approaches it from above, with a bird’s-eye view, and as a problem of political economy. Obsolescence, redundancy, fungibility: these are political problems for Lovely. And yet those tuned into the noisy and ever-evolving discourse surrounding artificial intelligence know that most of the issues being discussed today do not run neatly along the usual political fault lines. Indeed, as Lovely acknowledges early on in his book, on what other subject do we find Elon Musk siding with the Service Employees International Union against Nancy Pelosi and far-right billionaire Marc Andreessen? Or Steve Bannon agreeing with Barack Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice, while openly criticizing Donald Trump’s policies?

Lovely claims there is one matter everyone should be able to agree on, though: the fact that “a tiny group of people, backed by the most well-resourced organizations in the world, is attempting to render us obsolete.” Put like that, you might think the claim sounds tendentious at best (and, at worst, a sign of political paranoia). You might think that most of the artificial intelligence labs would recoil from such a description. But as Lovely is quick to point out, these companies have been remarkably candid about their ambition to do away with human labor.