One ordinary morning, 2031
A near-future story. AI made life wonderful, but you rent all of it from a few companies. One morning it switches off, at home and at work: locked out of your own login, the fridge spoiled, the office floor frozen, the warehouse line stopped. The neighbour who kept one corner that answers only to him, and whose company runs its own local AI, just keeps going.
The mechanism is not fiction
This is not rare. A real cyberattack set a supermarket chain's freezers to 50 degrees overnight and spoiled the food. Every day your data also leaves the building through almost every service: free email, apps and their trusted partners, loyalty cards, doorbells, website analytics, even the security plugin that is supposed to protect you. Any service where your data goes to a third party is a place it can leak, be sold, be switched off, or be spoiled.
The good news
AI is the best thing that happened to normal life; the catch is who owns it. The real divide of our lifetime will not be left against right, it will be centralised against your own. Hold your own data, run your own AI, keep one corner that answers only to you, at home and at work. Then you are fine in any country, under any system, standing on your own floor. It is a skill now, soon as ordinary as locking your front door, and our children will need it most of all.