Stop shaming people for using AI. Start organizing to prevent our obsolescence | Garrison Lovely

The industry is engaged in a perverse quest to replace humans. We cannot cede the best tools available to the other side

I don’t need to tell you that people hate AI. The list of grievances is long: slop, cheating, bias, enfeeblement, electricity bills, environmental destruction, exploitation, theft, cybercrime, doom. But resistance to the technology has often taken the form of shaming people for personally using it, with precious little organizing against the companies building the machines. This is perplexing, given that those companies are attempting to render us obsolete.

The executives may contest this framing, offering some bromides about how AI will augment human work or how we’ll simply find new jobs to do. But their clear goals are to create systems that so clearly surpass our abilities that we will have little hope of competing.

OpenAI defines its north star of artificial general intelligence (AGI) as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work”. And the Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, writes : “AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.”

The industry’s ultimate ambition, what it calls AGI, is better understood as a universal labor-replacing machine. These systems would be able to do any work a human could do from a remote desk, leaving livelihoods safe to the extent a human touch is preferred, a physical presence is required, or the jobs themselves are legally protected.

You may doubt that the industry will ever succeed in its perverse quest, but we should agree that it shouldn’t even be allowed to try.

We should freeze frontier AI development, that is, the effort to build AGI, and only resume the work when there is strong public buy-in and broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably.

But realizing this commonsense ideal will require us to get organized enough to overcome the richest industry in history. And that means changing the way we think about AI.

In many corners of the internet, especially on the left, people pride themselves on never touching the stuff, while simultaneously making bold, deeply mistaken claims about its nature and capabilities.

I understand the reluctance to give these companies your money, your data, your attention. But using what is increasingly an indispensable technology is not an endorsement of the industry building it, any more so than using Instagram to advocate for aggressive regulations on social media would be an endorsement of Mark Zuckerberg’s toxic empire.

Moreover, the people using AI are going to outcompete the ones who don’t, bending the world in their preferred direction, while forming a deeper understanding of the technology itself. Bosses will use Claude Code to replace workers, while the leftist policy analyst Matt Bruenig is having it build a publicly accessible, automatically updating database of National Labor Relations Board decisions. If you’re serious about your mission, you should use whichever tools work best.

Most importantly, anyone not seriously engaging with what the technology can already do, and might soon do, is ceding their seat at the table. Sixty-nine active members of Congress have publicly used terms like artificial superintelligence, the Singularity and AI existential risk. If certain techies are the only people willing to acknowledge that the technology’s capabilities have dramatically improved and could pose a species-level threat in the future, that’s who concerned policymakers will disproportionately listen to.

The left’s lack of engagement here is a real loss. Even non-leftists recognize it. Joshua Achiam, then OpenAI’s chief futurist, declared : “The left has completely abdicated their role in this discussion. A decade from now, this will be understood on the left to have been a generational mistake; perhaps even more than merely generational.”

Dean Ball, who led the authorship of Trump’s AI action plan before becoming an executive at OpenAI, declared : “Joshua is right.”

You may be suspicious of political adversaries wishing you were more present in the arena, but they recognize that, on the technology’s current course, this is an all-hands-on-deck situation. Indeed, we all need to reckon with the industry’s race to replace us, but we especially need, and especially don’t have, the left. We need organizers. We need people who can’t help but think about power to teach the ones who never learned to. We need ambition. We need people who believe that better worlds are possible.

The popularity of stigmatizing individual AI usage has been a gift to the industry, fracturing would-be opponents and activating our identities as consumers. BP had to pay an ad agency to popularize the “carbon footprint” to shift the blame for climate change to individuals. When we think as consumers, the goal becomes minimizing our own complicity. We should instead think as citizens: how do we democratically govern this technology in the public interest?

Right now, AI is being governed by unelected, unaccountable tech billionaires, subject to intense pressures from shareholders and the Trump administration. To have any hope of changing this intolerable status quo, we’ll need to build a movement powerful enough to defeat the richest industry in history.

In March, when I finished writing Obsolete , the book this piece draws from, I predicted:

It won’t be easy, but the ingredients are there for a mass movement unlike any the world has ever seen. Everyone has a stake in how AI develops, a reality that will become increasingly indisputable as the technology eats ever more of the world.

Since then, the dangers have appeared faster than I expected, but public awareness has grown even faster, making me feel more optimistic than ever. The AI story was never going to have a happy ending without deep and sustained engagement from the world, not just the tiny handful of people racing to build our replacements.

The big question is whether we can channel this new wave of concern into effective advocacy. Personally, I think the most promising place to start is at Irreplaceable.org . (I serve on the non-profit board and am donating my share of the book’s royalties to Irreplaceable.) Founded by veterans of the climate movement, Irreplaceable aims to meet people where they are, organize their anger into political power, and build a coalition strong enough to win democratic control over AI. The non-profit is organizing a national walkout to Freeze AI on 20 October. Anyone can join one near them or host their own.

I have no illusions that a day of walkouts will solve our AI problems. But it will bring together people with shared concerns, and some of them will become the friendships that sustain successful movements. Most of all, we’ll need to keep our eye on the ball: the companies trying to render us obsolete, not the friends and neighbors using their products.

Garrison Lovely is a freelance journalist, the author of Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us, and How to Stop It (Nation Books, 29 September), and the co-host of the podcast Organize Against the Machine