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.

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

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.