today: their economy is rather decoupled from that of the machines, so the presence of the machines elsewhere has little effect on them except for the occasional useful technologies that they can understand and reproduce for themselves—much as the Amish and various technology-relinquishing native tribes today have standards of living at least as good as they had in old times. It doesn’t matter that the humans have nothing to sell that the machines need, since the machines need nothing in return.
This doesn't seem very plausible to me outsie of a few small communities - like the Amish of today.
