OBSOLETE | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation

Is AI a bubble or humanity’s last invention? An existing harm or an existential threat? Obsolete cuts through the hype and false binaries to answer all the AI questions you have, while raising some you probably aren’t prepared for.

Many today don’t get further than seeing AI as a boondoggle—a new shiny object for techno-capitalists to sink their cash into as we barrel toward climate disaster. Obsolete takes those concerns seriously, but implores us to keep our eye on the ball: the attempt to render you obsolete.

The scale of their project has no real precedent. What we think 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 wants this vast transformation to succeed. Yet we’re letting it proceed virtually unabated. 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 takes on all three.

AI expert and journalist Garrison Lovely’s debut is a refreshing reset on an AI debate in which basically everyone is getting some big things wrong. With deep access to top researchers, advocates, and industry insiders, Obsolete offers a new way to think about the technology and a plan for deciding its future democratically.

Garrison Lovely is joining us on the Busboys stage to share more about “the perils of allowing AI to develop without oversight” (Publisher’s Weekly). Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Lovely will be signing following the program.

This event is free and open to all. Doors open to guests at 5:30pm. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of OBSOLETE will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is in person.

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Garrison Lovely is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, known for his cover stories in The Nation (“Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower”) and Jacobin (“Can Humanity Survive AI?”), as well as writing in The New York Times, BBC, Nature, MIT Technology Review, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, TIME, The Guardian, The Verge, and elsewhere. He was previously a reporter in residence at the Omidyar Network and is the author of Obsolete, a Substack on the political economy of artificial intelligence. Lovely’s work has been translated into five languages and cited by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, ProPublica, and others.

BOOK DETAILS

Obsolete

The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us—and How to Stop It

By Garrison Lovely

September 29, 2026 | Paperback, 384 pages, 22.95