I'd be very surprised if the oligarchs didn't still employ humans.

If nothing else, it's a way of demonstrating status - "sure, I could have an AI do it more cheaply, but instead I have an actual sentient being doing my bidding, because I can."

To give a parallel that I think is reasonably illustrative, it would not at all surprise me if in the future everybody else uses fully automated self driving vehicles, but the truly rich still hire chauffeurs.

Past a certain point of wealth, "because it would be cheaper" becomes a socially enforced reason to *not* do something.

Among the classes rich enough to employ servants, complaining about those same servants is a perennial thing. Even a valet or chauffeur who comes out of an elite training school and knows to stay at the margins of his or her employer’s consciousness, might still have small human quirks that irk that employer. So, machines may well prove preferable to humans.

In real life sure, and I've made similar suggestions myself[0], but within the story that was not something I remember. Would break continuity if done as a sequel, I think.

[0] From https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/11/18-13.16.17.html

"""AI could disrupt the economics of our current world more dramatically than industrialisation, whether under capitalism or communism, disrupted feudalism; but that is a very different question than "will it take all our jobs", especially as the super-rich have repeatedly shown that they like to show off their wealth by [wasting it on unnecessarily][1] [expensive things that are often worse than the cheap equivalent][2], even in a dystopian world where super-rich owners of AI have it all and the rest of us get their scraps, there's going to be jobs."""

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20240526081630/https://gizmodo.c...