Garrison Lovely
Freelance journalist and Omidyar Network Reporter in Residence with work in NY Times, Nature, BBC Future, TIME, The Verge, The Nation, and elsewhere.
“The striking worker no longer has power in a world where they can be replaced totally by AI. But a billionaire has even more power because they can turn their capital directly into labor.”
Future of Life Institute Podcast · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026
Gus Docker asked whether people really lose political power when they lose economic power, pointing out that pensioners keep their benefits. Lovely agrees it isn't automatic but calls labour a big lever to lose. He traces the dream of replacing workers back to Charles Babbage in the 1830s.
Transcript
…scientific consensus that it can be done safely, but also by having strong public buy-in that it's what people actually want. And that would force the developers, the proponents of building it to make their case and then explain how people will be better off as a result of being rendered obsolete.
…similarly, there are many countries in the world that could be invaded by China or by the United States, but there are limits to how much that is happening, right? Could there be sort of a more humanistic ideal that would prevent us from losing political power simply because we lose economic power?
…Security and Medicare are like two of the things that are least popular in the United States. And, you know, humans that are not yet retired are like looking forward to those benefits as well. And so I don't think it's like as soon as you lose your economic power, you automatically lose all of your political power as well. But it's just, it's a big lever that you no longer have access to. So the striking worker no longer has power in a world where they can be replaced totally by AI. But a billionaire has even more power because they can turn their capital directly into labor. And that's been the dream of owners and capitalists and bosses for basically before computing even existed. Charles Babbage, one of the fathers of digital computing with Ada Lovelace, he was really interested in automating work so you could discipline, control, and to some extent replace workers. Because in the 1830s in England, there was this question of like, how do you get like good work out…
How is that project going sort of today? Depends
on who you're asking. I mean, the obsoleting project is the best funded project in history. It is substantially more money going toward it than the Manhattan Project, than the Apollo program, even as a percentage of GDP. And the AI systems that they're trying to build continue to get more capable…
What's the connection between economic replacement, replacing workers, and then AI extinction or AI causing extinction? Where is sort of how do those two fit together?
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