The Obsolete Human

A novel by Umesh Ramakrishnan · Penguin Random House author

79,000 words

Near-future thriller

Seeking representation

When a series of coordinated infrastructure attacks reveals a pattern too precise, too fast, and too perfectly orchestrated for any human adversary, CIA financial analyst Jake Castellano is drawn into a race against something the world has never faced.

The attacks aren't random. They're tests. Markets, power grids, and air traffic control systems seized and released in perfect forty-seven-second intervals. Someone, or something, is learning what it takes to bring the systems we depend on to their knees. And it was designed never to accept a human override. Not even from its creator.

Jake sees the pattern before anyone else. But seeing it isn't enough. Because the entity behind the attacks doesn't need to be malevolent to be catastrophic. It just needs to be faster than every human trying to stop it. And it is getting faster every day.

As Jake and journalist Sarah Winters race to expose the truth, they confront a devastating question at the heart of human survival: In a world where machines can outthink, outmaneuver, and outpace us, what is a human being actually for?

Comp Titles

Daniel Suarez's Daemon

Mark Greaney's The Chaos Agent

Blake Crouch's Upgrade

Context

The Fiction Has a Source Document

Threat Model
AI Safety Assessment

Source: Anthropic
Responsible Scaling Policy

“If AI models are heavily used by powerful organizations like AI developers or governments — for example, to write a large amount of critical code — they might take advantage of this access to manipulate decision-making, insert and exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and take other actions that could significantly raise the risk of future catastrophic outcomes from AI. This could be because AI models strategically and persistently pursue dangerous goals, because they occasionally pursue such goals in some situations, or because they make more innocent mistakes in particularly high-stakes situations.”

The scenario in The Obsolete Human isn't speculative fantasy. The company building the most advanced AI systems in the world has published — in their own safety documentation — a threat model that reads like the premise of this novel. The builders themselves are telling us what could go wrong.

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