Perspective. Everything old is new again?
The return of domestic servants – thanks to AI and automation
AI and automation are reviving old economic structures ruled by inequality. Household servants – maids, couriers, pet carers and food delivery workers – are being reborn behind the convenient guise of the gig economy. Astrid Krenz and Holger Strulik write that this is not a cultural phenomenon, but a predictable outcome of structural economic forces such as automation, inequality and shifts in high earners’ time allocation decisions.
How AI conquers the world?
An engineered descent: How AI is pulling us into a new Dark Age
Carl Sagan once warned of a future in which citizens, detached from science and reason, would become passive consumers of comforting illusions. He feared a society “unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true,” adrift in superstition while clutching crystals and horoscopes.
But what Sagan envisioned as a slow civilizational decay now seems to be accelerating not despite technological progress, but because of how it’s being weaponised.
Across fringe platforms and encrypted channels, artificial intelligence models are being trained not to inform, but to affirm. They are optimised for ideological purity, fine-tuned to echo the user’s worldview, and deployed to coach belief systems rather than challenge us to think. These systems don’t hallucinate at random. Instead, they deliver a narrative with conviction, fluency, and feedback loops that mimic intimacy while eroding independent thought.
We are moving from an age of disinformation into one of engineered delusion.
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