I’m a Korean sci-fi writer currently working on the second volume of my novel.
While writing, I started thinking about a future where humanoids with AI-level cognition become cheap enough for ordinary people to own.
Not as assistants - but as economic extensions of themselves.
Instead of going to work yourself, you buy humanoids that go out into the world and generate income for you.
At that point, human competitiveness may no longer depend on how much you learn, but on how intelligently you design, train, or optimize your humanoids.
And eventually, I started wondering:
Would owning better humanoids become the new form of social class?
Would people still care about improving themselves - or would they only care about improving the beings that represent them economically?
The idea only appears briefly in the worldbuilding right now, but I’m curious what SF readers think.
Would this kind of future create freedom for humans… or just a new form of inequality?