Isaac Asimov describes how AI will liberate humans and their creativity (1992)
> Isaac Asimov describes artificial intelligence as “a phrase that we use for any device that does things which, in the past, we have associated only with human intelligence.”
This is a pretty good definition, honestly. It explains the AI Effect quite well: calculators aren’t “AI” because it’s been a while since humans were the only ones who could do arithmetic. At one point they were, though.
Funny thing About Asimov was how he came up with the laws of robotics and then cases on how they don't work. There are a few that I remember, one where a robot was lying because a bug in his brain gave him empathy and he didn't want to hurt humans.
It certainly is liberating all our creative works from our possession...
What we are labeling as AI today is different than was thought to be in the 90s, or when Asimov wrote most of his stories about robots and other ways of AI.
Saying that, a variant of Susan Calvin role could prove to be useful today.
I wouldn't put too much stock in this. Asimov was a fantasy writer telling fictional stories about the future. He was good at it, which is why you listen and why it's enjoyable, but it's still all a fantasy.
> humanity in general will be freed from all kinds of work that’s really an insult to the human brain.
He can only be referring to these Jira tickets I need to write.
Back then, when we also believed the access to every imaginable information through the internet and allowing communication across the globe would lead to universal wisdom, world-peace and an unimaginable utopia where common sense, based on science and knowledge prevails.
Oh boy, how foolish we've been!
I'm just hoping it brings out an explosion of new thought and not less thought. Will likely be both.
I have a genuine question I can’t find or come up with a viable answer to, a matter of said “unpleasantness” as he puts it; how do people make money or otherwise sustain themselves in this AI scenario we are facing?
Has anyone heard a viable solution, or even has one themselves?
I don’t hear anything about UBI anymore, could that be because after roughly 60+ million alien people flooding into western countries from countries with a populations so large that are effectively endless? What do we do about that? Will that snuff out any kind of advancement in the west when the roughly 6 billion people all want to be in the west where everyone gets UBI and it’s the land of milk and honey?
So what do we do then? We can’t all be tech industry people with 6-figure plus salaries, vested ownership, and most people aren’t multi-millionaires that can live far away from the consequences while demanding others subject themselves to them.
Which way?
He also wrote a story about how AI will create a non-literate society, because we'll all just talk to the computers whenever we need anything.
I think we need to consider what the end goal of technology is at a very broad level.
Asimov says in this that there are things computers will be good at, and things humans will be good at. By embracing that complementary relationship, we can advance as a society and be free to do the things that only humans can do.
That is definitely how I wish things were going. But it's becoming clear that within a few more years, computers will be far better at absolutely everything than human beings could ever be. We are not far even now from a prompt accepting a request such as "Write a another volume of the Foundation series, in the style of Isaac Asimov", and getting a complete novel that does not need editing, does not need review, and is equal to or better than the quality of the original novels.
When that goal is achieved, what then are humans "for"? Humans need purpose, and we are going to be in a position where we don't serve any purpose. I am worried about what will become of us after we have made ourselves obsolete.
> 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.
Seeing the creativity most people employ, that is for selfish loopholes and inconsiderate behaviour, I am a little wary of empowering them.
Asimov is probably my least favorite major science fiction author (that I've read a significant number of works from).
Something about his worldview always seemed off to me, although I didn't know he actually seriously held such utopian convictions about AI. It explains an awful lot of the way his stories are.
The final part of this article is the main point, not the headline
I let Gemini 2.5 Pro (the image is from ChatGpt) write a short sci fi story. I think it did a decent job.
Reminds me of Jacque Fresco (Venus Project)!
I don't think Asimov envisioned a world where AI would be controlled by a clique of ultra-wealthy oligarchs.
92 huh? That is an opinion from a long time ago.
The question I have is why AI technology is being so aggressively advertised nowadays, and why none of it seems to be liberating in any way.
Once the plow liberated humans from some kinds of work. Some time later it was just a tool that slaves, very non liberated, used to tend to rich people's farms.
Technology is tricky. I don't trust who is developing AI to be liberating.
The article also plays on the "favorite author" thing. It knows many young folk see Asimov as a role model, so it is leveraging that emotional connection to gather conversation around a topic that is not what it seems to be. I consider it a dirty trick. It is disgraceful given the current world situation (AI being used for war, surveillance, brainwashing).
We are better than this.
Isaac Asimov's view of the future has aged surprisingly well. But techno-utopianism has not.
It is an interesting time for LLMs to burst on the scene. Most online forums have already turned people into text replicators. Most HN commenters can be prompted into “write a comment about slop violating copyright” / “write a comment about Google violating privacy” / “write a comment about managers not understanding remote work”. All you have to do is state the opposite.
A perfect time for LLMs to show up and do the same. The subreddit simulators were hilarious because of the unusual ways they would perform but a modern LLM is a near perfect approximation of the average HN commenter.
I would have assumed that making LLMs indistinguishable from these humans would make those kinds of comments less interesting to interact with but there’s a base level of conversation that hooks people.
On Twitter, LLM-equipped Indians cosplay as right wing white supremacists and amass large followings (also bots, perhaps?) revealed only when they have to participate in synchronous conversation.
And yet, they are still popular. Even the “Texas has warm water ports” Texan is still around and has a following (many of whom seem non-bot though who can tell?).
Even though we have a literal drone, humans still engage in drone behaviour and other humans still engage them. Fascinating. I wonder whether the truth is that the inherent past-replication of low-temperature LLMs is likely to fix us to our present state than to raise us to a new equilibrium.
Experiments in Musical Intelligence is now over 40 years old and I thought it was going to revolutionize things: unknown melodies discovered by machine married to mind. Maybe LLMs aren’t going to move us forward only because this point is already a strong attractor. I’m optimistic in the power of boredom, though!
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LLMs are statistical models trained on human-generated text. They aren't the perfectly logical "machine brains" that Asimov and others imagined.
The upshot of this is that LLMs are quite good at the stuff that he thinks only humans will be able to do. What they aren't so good at (yet) is really rigorous reasoning, exactly the opposite of what 20th century people assumed.