In a long read at Spiked!, urban studies specialist Joel Kotkin offers a gloomy assessment of our AI future.

His concern is not with the tech as such but with the growing power of the tech companies. Three excerpts below give the sense of it but there’s a lot more that’s worth a look:

These elite tech companies are far more powerful than Trump or any state apart from China. Apple, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are individually all worth more than Italy, Canada, Brazil, Russia or Mexico. More importantly, these companies increasingly dominate information flows, much of Hollywood and, most disturbingly, have gained an unprecedented hold on society, particularly among younger generations.

Our era is marked by a shift in geopolitical influence from governments towards a handful of elite tech firms which, as National Affairs notes, constitute ‘new superpowers’ on the global stage. One writer predicts that AI will become ‘the third superpower’, but, at least in the democratic West, the ‘leaders’ in executive office don’t call the shots.

“AI is ushering in a techno-feudal future,” October 10, 2026

The agenda of the AI elite stands in stark contradiction to the one long favoured by traditional liberals and social democrats, which aimed to empower and enrich the middle and working classes. That is not the agenda of the AI nabobs. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei calls his algorithms ‘machines of loving grace’, whose main job is to advance what one sceptic calls ‘the obsoleting project’ of replacing human labour with AI…

The winners will not be the suddenly redundant working and middle classes but the technocratic elites and their investors. These firms are essentially indifferent to the values and aspirations of most people currently alive. “Techno-feudal future”

There is even a tendency among the oligarchs to suggest that they and their creations will soon rule over us – and that they should. This is too much even for Elon Musk. When the SpaceX supremo raised concerns about AI and the future of humanity, Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, accused him of being a ‘speciesist’ because he was supposedly too concerned about the fate of Homo sapiens in Page’s imagined ‘digital utopia’. This vision of AI-driven prosperity is also embraced by many libertarian apologists, who denounce ‘AI Luddites’. Some 80 reporters appear to be on the oligarchic payroll through organisations such as the Tarbell Centre for AI Journalism. “Techno-feudal future”

As computer science prof Robert J. Marks points out here today, we are encouraged to think in terms of AI Doomsdays.

We are not encouraged to think in terms of a much more realistic scenario — a gradual transfer of power from ourselves and our elected representatives to AI tech moguls.

Agree or disagree, Kotkin’s view is food for thought and the whole article is worth a careful read.