Who are you when the machine can do it all, and death is optional?
This isn't a book about machines taking your job. It's about the question they're forcing on every one of us, and it's as old as people: who are you, underneath what you do for others?
Out now in Kindle, paperback and hardcover.
The book everyone else is writing, turned inside out.
Obsolete
Who Are You When the Machine Can Do It All, and Death Is Optional?
The job is going, and the life is lengthening. Every other book on this takes one thing for granted: that there's a self for whom a long life is worth having. For twenty years in the chair, and two of them sitting with people in the last rooms of their lives, I learned the self is often never built. The function did its work instead. Obsolete is about the person underneath, and it's about you.
Kindle on Amazon US · UK · Australia · Canada
Paperback on Amazon US · UK · Australia
Hardcover on Amazon UK · Australia
It's for everyone. If you've ever been the one who was needed, by anyone, for anything, it's about you.
For your whole life, being needed has answered that question for you. It was never only a demand. It was an anaesthetic. Now the machines are taking the function away and medicine is stretching the years, so the anaesthetic is wearing off while you're still wide awake, with most of your life in front of you.
What this book does
- It asks the question honestly, and lets you run it on yourself.
- It traces how we got here, through the oldest human wishes behind every machine.
- In Part Four, The Ground, it gives you the first steps of the building: how to manufacture your own necessity, how to matter to yourself, and the work you can begin on your own.
What it doesn't pretend to do
No book can do the deeper work for you, and this one doesn't try. Nobody yet knows exactly what AI will do to the world, or when much longer lives arrive, so there's no neat answer to hand you. Obsolete gives you the question, the ground to stand on and the first steps. For anyone who wants to go all the way in, it shows where the deeper work lives.
- Published
- 23 September 2026, Athanatos Press
- Paperback
- ISBN 978-1-918543-42-1
- Hardcover
- ISBN 978-1-918543-43-8
Michael Lauria is a qualified therapist, author and philosophical mythologist. In practice since 2006, with more than 25,000 hours in the chair, he is the author of Obsolete and Twenty Years in the Chair, published 4 November 2026.