Garrison Lovely

Author and journalist

Titles as the sources gave them. In 1 entry, with 5 checked quotations.

What they said

Newest first. Each quotation was found word for word in the source.

“I think that rendering us obsolete means disempowering people because their labor power is a source of economic power and political power, and so if people lose that because they are replaceable, then you lose a mechanism of democratic accountability”
The Trillion-Dollar AI Race to Replace Us (with Garrison Lovely)Future of Life Institute, October 13, 2026. Answering the host's objection that many people who do not work still live good lives: why being made economically obsolete is dangerous.
Speaker known from context, not confirmed by listening
“I'm not against building it at some point. I think it should just be when you know you can do it safely and when there's actual public buy in, so you can make the case to people and they're making an informed consensual decision to bring this into the world”
The Trillion-Dollar AI Race to Replace Us (with Garrison Lovely)Future of Life Institute, October 13, 2026. Asked whether humanity has ever declined a general-purpose technology; the guest's condition for when building AGI would be acceptable.
Speaker known from context, not confirmed by listening
“I think you should just ban certain developments and developing AGI would be top of the list for me”
The Trillion-Dollar AI Race to Replace Us (with Garrison Lovely)Future of Life Institute, October 13, 2026. On public opposition to data centers, arguing a data center moratorium would slow the industry less than banning specific developments.
Speaker known from context, not confirmed by listening
“I think it's like quite clear that the machines will not reliably do what you want them to do. They are unpredictable. We do not understand how they work at a fundamental level”
The Trillion-Dollar AI Race to Replace Us (with Garrison Lovely)Future of Life Institute, October 13, 2026. Asked why AI development continues if most interests are against it; on why capable, unpredictable systems should worry states and businesses.
Speaker known from context, not confirmed by listening
“if you can build a movement that's powerful enough to make presidents think that their fates will hinge on their response to the movement, then you can make things that seem impossible become not just possible, but go beyond what the demands actually require”
The Trillion-Dollar AI Race to Replace Us (with Garrison Lovely)Future of Life Institute, October 13, 2026. Closing the account of the 1980s nuclear freeze movement, which the speaker says the book's final chapter covers, as a model for organizing on AI.

In the Base

Every entry they appear in.

  1. PodcastFuture of Life InstituteSpeaks

    The Trillion-Dollar AI Race to Replace Us (with Garrison Lovely)

    In an 80-minute Future of Life Institute podcast, host Gus Docker interviews journalist Garrison Lovely about Lovely's book Obsolete. Lovely argues the AI industry aims to build machines that replace human labor, that this would strip people of economic and political power, that AGI is not inevitable, and that a mass movement like the nuclear freeze could stop it.