I talked to Garrison Lovely, author of the new book Obsolete, about his case that we shouldn’t just slow down AGI. We should stop building it.
We started with the fights inside the left, where Lovely has spent a lot of time arguing with Ed Zitron’s bubble thesis and Emily Bender’s “stochastic parrots” critique. Skeptics like these dominate the discourse on Bluesky, but Lovely believes ordinary Americans take the risks more seriously.
Lovely’s worry isn’t only rogue AI. He fears that obedient AI will hand unprecedented power to whoever controls it. To prevent that, Lovely wants to freeze frontier development now: Opus 5.5, GPT-6, and Gemini 4 would be the last models US companies get to make. The labs could keep serving customers, but there would be no bigger training runs. A superintelligence ban bill from Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar would back that up with up to twenty years in prison.
I pushed back on the definitions. A nuclear bomb either blows up or it doesn’t, but AI capabilities are jagged, and OpenAI and Microsoft spent years quietly agreeing that nothing counted as “AGI.” Wouldn’t company lawyers find ways to advance the frontier while staying within the letter of any superintelligence ban? I was even more skeptical of his idea of barring the labs from using coding agents on AI research. Why should everyone in the world get to use them except OpenAI and Anthropic?
I didn’t find all of Lovely’s arguments convincing, but I really enjoyed talking to him!
