One of the biggest advances is that you can create works of art, literature, and music in seconds. The majority of this is very low-denominator stuff, and many people bemoan the destruction of higher human art in favour of—for example—personalised pop lyrics that narrate your drive home from the grocery store. However, the smarter and more determined art/literary types have realised that data is everything, and form niche subcultures, forums, and communities where they carefully curate their favourite works, talk to AIs about them, get AIs to remix them, harshly critique the outputs, and have endless discussions about taste. This means that amid the sea of mediocrity, there are a few tendrils of excellence growing.
After an inter-party struggle among the Democrats between a more technocrat and centrist wing and an economically-populist, AI-bashing wing, the latter looks to be doing better. A controversial core policy drive is to legislate that humans need to be “in the loop” in many corporate and government functions. The AI-bullish critics point out that this will mean humans just inspect AI outputs and rubber-stamp them while collecting a salary. The smart counter-critics point out that yes, that will happen, but that’s the point because this is all a way to eventually transition to what’s basically “UBI through bullshit jobs” with minimal social disruption. The smart counter-counter-critics ask why not just go straight to UBI then. The smart counter-counter-counter-critics point out that the country is just not yet at the GDP/capita level or the financial health level to fund a more ambitious UBI scheme yet. The Republicans paint all of this as a jobs program for Democrat voters and are opposed. A strong economy helps the Republicans win the presidency in 2028.
The world overall is moving towards a bipolar order between the US and China. Compared to the Cold War, however, both powers are more inwardly-focused and less ideological. The US is in an isolationist era. While China is gradually converting much of the third world into client states, the CCP's main goal remains internal stability and its secondary goal "making the world safe for dictatorship", rather than the ideological expansionism of the Soviet Union. The Taiwan question has been punted into the mid-2030s, as the CCP believes the world's reaction will be much more muted and less dangerous to Party control once America no longer cares about Taiwanese chips, and once even more of the world has been preemptively bribed into silence.
Somewhere on the top of the stack there are still humans who on-paper own or control the assets and can make decisions (whether as a private actor or as a government overseeing autonomous AI companies operating in its territory), but they see numbers that track their wealth and power ticking up, so they have no reason to call a stop to it, and don’t understand it anymore.