Forbes Thinks AI Created a New Profession. History Has Seen It Before.
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Forbes Thinks AI Created a New Profession. History Has Seen It Before.<br>Every technological boom comes with a wave of stories explaining why *this time* everything is different. AI is no exception.
Kirill<br>Jul 13, 2026
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Read enough tech news and you’ll start believing AI is changing not just software, but dating, friendship, loneliness—even intimacy.<br>A recent Forbes article fits neatly into that narrative.<br>It profiles a new class of luxury escorts in Silicon Valley. They learn enough about AI, Nvidia, crypto, and biohacking to hold long conversations with founders, researchers, and newly minted AI millionaires. One client spends the night talking about the future of AGI. Another buys his escort a Mac mini so she can run local AI models. Some charge several thousand dollars per meeting.<br>The conclusion is easy to follow.<br>As AI makes digital companionship cheap, genuine human attention becomes expensive.
It sounds like a product of the AI era.<br>Then you pick up a book about Japanese geishas.<br>For centuries, geishas trained in music, dance, poetry, and conversation. Wealthy patrons paid for their company because they knew how to make an evening memorable. They entertained, listened, challenged ideas, and created an experience no ordinary dinner could offer.<br>The parallels appear almost immediately.<br>The conversations changed.<br>The clients changed.<br>The setting changed.<br>Kyoto became Silicon Valley.<br>Poetry became GPUs.<br>The underlying demand barely moved.<br>And Japan wasn’t unique.<br>French courtesans, ancient Greek hetaerae, and the hostesses of European salons all filled remarkably similar roles. People weren’t paying only for sex. They were paying for attention, conversation, status, intellectual companionship, and a few uninterrupted hours with someone genuinely interesting.<br>That’s what makes the Forbes article so fascinating.<br>Not because of the escorts, because of the explanation.<br>It treats AI as the force that created this market.<br>History suggests something else.<br>The market was already there.<br>Each generation simply finds a new language to describe it.<br>Today the language is AGI, Nvidia, and LLMs.<br>A century ago it was high society.<br>Centuries before that it was art, patronage, and court life.<br>Technology changes.<br>Culture changes.<br>The stories we tell ourselves change.<br>Human motives are much slower.<br>AI is reshaping the world in countless ways.<br>But every once in a while, it doesn’t create something new.<br>It simply gives an old pattern a modern explanation.
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