We Should Stop, Not Slow, Our Obsolescence
The AI industry's biggest letter yet doesn't go far enough, but it's a welcome step
I appeared on Breaking Points last week to discuss OpenAI’s unprecedented, fully autonomous cyberattack on another company. That spot, along with some help from friends, bumped my forthcoming book Obsolete up in the Amazon rankings a lot (it’s the #4 new release in one of its subcategories). If you’d like to help the book reach more people, preordering there is a time-sensitive and leveraged way to do so, as it bumps up how much the algorithm shows it to other people. If you feel gross about ordering there (I get it), rest assured that the book’s success would not be good for Amazon’s business interests.
1,100+ employees at frontier AI companies, including cofounders of OpenAI and Anthropic, just effectively called on the US to build a pause button, signing a statement ending with this demand:
We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.
For most of the time I was writing my book, Obsolete, "build a pause button" was my main policy recommendation.
It seemed impossible to object to such a proposal, even if you thought things weren't dangerous yet. But as I sat with what the industry was trying to do—render us all obsolete—how it was going about it, and what it would even mean to "align" universal labor-replacing machines in a world ruled by despots and their imitators, it became clear that a pause button, while welcome, was a wholly inadequate response, whose primary appeal was in how unobjectionable it was.
The thing that really made the "build a pause button" idea feel ridiculous was rebranding the whole industry as what it really is: the Obsoleting Project.
We're going to build a pause button and maybe, eventually pause the Obsoleting Project? No! We're going to stop it! The Project is the objectionable thing. Stopping it is the commonsense—nearly universally appealing—solution.
The biggest blocker to realizing that stopping was the only adequate response has come from the industry, which has convinced itself and much of DC that we cannot stop, that our obsolescence is inevitable. But that's only true if we buy into the Project's founding delusion. If instead we get organized, we can and we will stop the Obsoleting Project.
And anyway, what are books for, if not challenging conventional wisdom? Especially when that conventional wisdom has created such a terrifying and unjust world.
For the full case, preorder Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us—and How to Stop It (Sept 15). I’ll have more to say in a few more places on the OpenAI hack and what stopping looks like. Stay tuned.