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

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.

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?

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...)

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.

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.

> You point out that it's perfectly possible to live a "simple" rural life.

Indeed, more the point though is that many people still live these lives. The propagation of technology is not uniform, slow, ongoing, and not necessarily even a good thing. My point is that technological progress and the feeling of living in a very advanced age is actually a veneer. The second point is how are we going to get massive adoption of technology that is decades away, when we still haven't fully adopted the technologies of the last two centuries?

> You mean poor, uneducated and without any real prospects of anything like a career?

A lot of those rural towns had large farms, which had people far richer than software engineers. I think there is a lot of complexity when characterizing 'rural' america (which is a lot closer to a lot people than I think they otherwise know).

I don't quite share those value judgements. I think it's varied and complicated. My point instead is really more about the propagation of technology. Another example is all of the US compared to say Japanese smart phones. I was told the USA is about 15 years behind in generalized smart phone tech. A podcast I was listening to recently talked about the deep integration of technology in Chinese Uber equivalents, something that is only recent in US offices where you can go into a room and 'cast' something onto a screen. Apparently in China, for a while, being able to play a movie on a screen in the back of an Uber has been a seemless and integrated experience for a long time. Another good example is credit card technology. The oldest is to do a carbon copy of the embossed phone numbers, to the magnetic strip, to the chip, to tap. Europe had chips used in all of their credit cards while some places in the US were still doing carbon copy, and even the "advanced places" were doing magnetic strip only. Canada has been ahead of the US for a while for point-of-payment systems, virtually every restaurant brings a card reader to you instead of (as is in the US) this dance where you give someone a credit card so they can go to the register where there is a wired machine where they swipe the card.

So, I suppose my biggest point is that technology spreads a lot slower than we tend to think. It's not a process of years, but decades and centuries. I'm really pushing back on this technophile sentiment that we're already living in a super advanced age with a strong society that is robust, that instead these are veneers with very uneven and slow moving advancement. This is not going to change overnight (or in the next century) just because someone creates an humanoid AI robot thing that can lift bails of hay and stack them in the right place. Given the lack of adoption of various technologies that we already see, I take that as evidence that nothing will change too quickly, 30 years or even more, just because we get a bit better with robotics.