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.

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.

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.