Isaac Asimov describes how AI will liberate humans and their creativity (1992)

> One wonders what Asimov would make of the world of 2025, and whether he’d still see artificial and natural intelligence as complementary, rather than in competition.

I mean, I just got done watching a presentation at Google Next where the presenter talked to an AI agent and set up a landscaping appointment with price match and a person could intervene to approve the price match.

It's cool, sure, but understand, that agent would absolutely have been a person on a phone five years ago, and if you replace them with agentic AI, that doesn't mean that person has gone away or is now free to write poetry. It means they're out of an income and benefits. And that's before you consider the effects on the pool of talent you're drawing from when you're looking for someone to intervene on behalf of these agentic AIs, like that supervisor did when they approved the price match. If you don't have the entry-level person, you don't have them five years later when you want to promote someone to manage.

Another thing I have noticed with automation in general is that the more you use it, the less you understand the thing being automated. I think the reason why a lot of things today are still being manually done is because humans inherently understand that for both short AND long term success with a task, a conceptual understanding of the components of the system, whether that is partially or fully imagined in the case of complex business scenarios, is necessary, even though it lengthens time to complete in the short term. How do you modify or grow a system you do not understand? It feels like you're cutting a branch at a certain length and not allowing it to grow beyond where you've placed the automation. I will be interested to see the outcome of the increased push today for advanced automation in places where the business relies on understanding of the system to make adjacent decisions/further business operations.

The 1980 version of your comment:

>Just saw a demo of a new word processor system that lets a manager dictate straight into the machine, and it prints the memo without a secretary ever touching it. Slick stuff. But five years ago, that memo would’ve gone through a typist. Replace her with a machine, and she’s not suddenly editing novels from home. She’s unemployed, losing her paycheck and benefits.

And when that system malfunctions, who’s left who actually knows how to fix it or manage the workflow? You can’t promote experience that never existed. Strip out the entry-level roles, and you cut off the path to leadership.

> if you replace them with agentic AI, that doesn't mean that person has gone away or is now free to write poetry. It means they're out of an income and benefits.

That's capitalism for ye :/ Join us on the UBI train.

Say, have you ever read the book 'Bullshit Jobs'...

if the AI transition really turns into an Artificial Labor revolution - if it really works and isn’t an illusion - then we’re going to have to have a major change in how we distribute wealth. The bad future is one where the owner class no longer has any use for human labor and the former-worker class has nothing

TBH this is already how the US got into the current mess.

The difference between the 1980 version of my post and the 2025 version of my post is that in 1980 there was conceivably a future where the secretary could retrain to do other work (likely with the help of one of those new-fangled microcomputers) that would need human intelligence in order to be completed.

The 2025 equivalent of the secretary is potentially looking across a job market that is far smaller because the labor she was trained to do, or labor similar enough to it that she could have previously successfully been hired, is now handled by artificial intelligence.

There is, effectively, no where for her to go to earn a living with her labor.

If your argument is that, all that happened and it all turned out fine: Are you sure we (socioeconomically, on average) are better off today then we were in the 1980s?

> That's capitalism for ye :/ Join us on the UBI train.

The people with all of the money effectively froze wages for 45 years, and that was when there were people actually doing labor for them.

What makes you think that they'll peaceably agree to UBI for people who don't sell them labor for money?

Not necessarily. The reality is the landscaping guy is struggling to handle callbacks or is burning overhead. Even then, two girls in the office hits a ceiling where it doesn’t scale quickly, now you’re in a call center scenario.

Call center based services always suck. I remember going to a talk where American Express, who operated best in class call centers, found that 75% of their customers don’t want to talk to them. The people are there because that’s needed for a complex relationship, the more stuff you can address earlier in the funnel, the better.

Customers don’t want to talk to you, and ultimately serving the customer is the point.

Not quite comparable; these systems will continue to grow in capacity until there is nothing for your average human to be able to reskill to. Not only that, they will truly be beyond our comprehension (arguably, they already are: our interpretability work is far from where it would need to be to safely build towards a superintelligence, and yet...)

> The people with all of the money effectively froze wages for 45 years

Yep. And they didn't accomplish that 'peaceably' either, for the record. A lot of people got murdered, many more smeared/threatened/imprisoned etc. Entire countries get decimated.

> What makes you think that they'll peaceably agree to UBI for people who don't sell them labor for money?

I don't imagine for a moment that they'll like UBI. There is no shortage of examples over recent millenia of how far the parasite class will go to keep the status quo.

History also shows us that having all the money doesn't guarantee that people will do things your way. Class awareness, strikes, unions, protest, and alternative systems/technological advance have shown their mettle. These things scare oligarchs because they work.

Probably depends who you refer to by "we". On a global level, the answer is definitely yes.

Extreme poverty decreased, child mortality decreased, literacy and access to electricity has gone up.

Are people unhappier? Maybe. But not because they lack something materially.

In theory, the economy should create new avenues. Labour costs are lower, goods and services get cheaper (inflation adjusted) and the money is spent on things that were once out of reach.

In practice I fear that the savings will make the rich richer, drive down labour's negotiating power and generally fail to elevate our standard of living.

I am hoping that will be our saving grace this time around as well, but my fear is that the oligarchs will control more autonomous power than we can meaningfully resist, and our existence will no longer be strictly necessary for their systems to operate.

Asimov's story The Feeling of Power seems relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

I think in this case its fair to assume what I meant was "the secretaries whose jobs were replaced in the 80s and people like them", or "the people whose jobs will be replaced with AI today"; not "literally the poorest and least educated people on the planet whose basic hierarchy of needs struggle to be met every day."

How can we reconcile this with how much of the US and world are still living as if it were the 1930s or even 1850s?

Travel 75 to 150 miles outside of a US city and it will feel like time travel. If so much is still 100 years behind, how will civilization so broadly adopt something that is yet more decades into the future?

I got into starlink debates with people during hurricane helene. Folks were glowing over how people just needed internet. Reality, internet meant fuck all when what you needed was someone with a chainsaw, a generator, heater, blankets, diapers and food.

Which is to say, technology and its importance is a thin veneer on top of organized society. All of which is frail and still has a long way to go to fully penetrate rural communities for even recent technology. At the same time, that spread is less important than it would seem to a technologist. Hence, technology has not uniformly spread everywhere, and ultimately it is not that important. Yet, how will AI, even more futuristic, leap frog this? My money is that rural towns USA will look almost identical in 30 years from now. Many look identical to 100 years ago still.

Who do you think voted for Trump? You point out that it's perfectly possible to live a "simple" rural life.

I see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggars_in_Spain and the reason why they vote the way they do. Modern society has left them behind, abandoned them, and not given them any way to keep up with the rest of the US. Now they're getting taken advantage of by the wealthy like Trump, Murdoch, Musk, etc. who use their unhappiness to rage against the machine.

> My money is that rural towns USA will look almost identical in 30 years from now.

You mean poor, uneducated and without any real prospects of anything like a career? Pretty much. Except there will be far more people who are impoverished and with no hope for the future. I don't see any of this as a good thing.

I am sure of that. I think people forget the difference in living conditions then.

Things that were common in that era that are rare today:

1. Living in shared accomodation. It was common then for people to live in boarding houses and bedsits as adults. Today these are largely extinct. Generally, the living space per person has increased substantially at every level of wealth. Only students live in this sort of environment today and even then it is usually a flat (ie. sharing with people you know on an equal basis) not a bedsit/boarding house (ie. living in someone's house according to her rules--no ladies in gentlemen's bedrooms, no noise after 8pm, etc.).

2. Second-hand clothes and repairing clothes. Most people wear new clothes. People buy second hand because it is trendy. Nobody really repairs anything because that is all they can afford. People just buy new. Nobody darns socks or puts elbow patches on jackets where they have worn out. Only people that buy expensive shoes get their shoes resoled. Normal people just buy cheap shoes more often and they really do save money doing this.

Today the woman that would have been a typist has a different job, and a more productive one that pays more.

But we have had the same thing happen constantly. Automation isn't new. How many individuals are involved in assembling a car today vs in the 1970s? An order of magnitude fewer. But there aren't loads of unemployed people. The market puts labour where it is needed.

Automation won't obsolete work and workers it will make us more productive and our desires will increase. We will all expect what today are considered luxuries only the rich can afford. We will all have custom software written for our needs. We will all have individual legal advice on any topic we need advice on. We will all have bigger houses with more stuff in them, better finishings, triple glazed windows, and on and on.

Wages haven't been frozen for 45 years in real terms. They have gone up considerably.

Compare wages to productivity [0]. Or compare the rise in wages to the rise in housing costs [1].

The vast majority of the gains in productivity have been captured and funneled upward.

0 - https://assets.weforum.org/editor/HFNnYrqruqvI_-Skg2C7ZYjdcX...

The dark humor in this is that any such technologically advanced future where humans have a meaningful say will eventually look like one of abundant luxury communism: it's just that the oligarchs' version will have a lot of people die first before the oligarchs enjoy their abundance.

The third option is that the oligarchy fully internalizes its pursuit of ruthless concentration of power. But in that case, someone will probably create an AI that's better at playing the power game, and at that point, it's over for the oligarchs.

yeah and then what. I don’t think desire is infinite.

It is uncapped and indefinite. People always want more than they have. We get used to what we have. What was considered a luxury is baseline today. Today's luxuries will before long be considered part of the "poverty line".

That graph is misinformation. It deliberately excludes the wages of the most productive workers (but includes their productivity) which makes it meaningless.