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A robot waiter, serving drinks at the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair, in Paris, on May 24, 2024.
- Magali Cohen / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
Imagine sitting down at a restaurant, speaking your order into your menu, and immediately watching a robot arrive with your food. Imagine the food being made quickly, precisely — and without a human involved, because the entire restaurant is fully roboticized.
Imagine those robots were made in China, powered by the next generation of AI.
This is all quite plausible. According to the International Federation of Robotics, global sales of professional service robots reached almost 200,000 units in 2024. More than one-fifth of those units were deployed in hospitality and service roles, including front-desk assistants and food-and-beverage delivery. One cafe in Beijing is now fully staffed with autonomous robots, which can talk to customers, take orders, and deliver drinks entirely on their own. The future of AI is physical, as Ian Bremmer recently noted.
China is the epicenter, now producing the majority of all worldwide robots, while the US falls increasingly behind. One recent study projected the size of China’s service-robot industry to reach $7.2 billion by 2031, accelerated by generous government subsidies and a focused industrial policy. From a Chinese perspective this makes sense, especially in light of their looming demographic bubble. By 2050, the country will have 150 million fewer people; China is leaning into robots instead.
Keenon is a market leader. It’s worth browsing their catalogue: Kleenbot, a simple roomba-like cleaner; Butlerbot, an R2D2-esque droid for hotels; Dinnerbot, a more complex automated waiter; and XMAN, a fully scifi humanoid robot with a base like a Segway. Keenon ships to over 600 global cities with no signs of slowing down.
Many societies are not ready.
Swapping a human greeter for a robot in a hotel lobby is far more visible than swapping a human assembler in a distant factory for algorithm-driven automation. The robot is public. It is physical. And it is branded — and if the brand is foreign, the communal understanding will be simple: “their machine replaced our person.”
Robotics firms of all nationalities know this risk, and marketing materials often emphasise robots’ “assistant” roles. Yet the scale and global spread of robotic deployments will be unspinnable. Countries will face difficult questions: Do they allow foreign-made service robots for their efficiency gains? Or do they regulate and protect domestic labor, potentially excluding or throttling foreign or global robot makers?
Governments will also be confronted with a national security challenge. If your country has millions of foreign robots, each with cameras, microphones, and motors, what happens if you have friction with their maker? At minimum your robots would likely be used as widespread spies. Beyond that, foreign robotics firms could disrupt your economy by remotely disabling the robots — the manufacturer could perhaps blame vague “glitches.” In the worst-case scenario, robots could rise up as guerilla fighters against their putative owners.
In the end, China’s surge in retail and service-robot exports may be as geopolitically significant as its earlier dominance in consumer electronics. The difference now is public-facing: a robot in a restaurant or lobby is more visible than a smartphone in your pocket. And if that robot is Chinese-made, the message takes on geopolitical overtones. The next time you are served by a machine, you might also be served a symbol — of automation, of global labour shifts, and of the next global convulsion.
“They are the world’s best salespeople,” Hurewitz told GZERO. Spies master the hardest pitch imaginable: convincing someone to commit treason. And the skills they use—empathy, curiosity, and what he calls “the art of elicitation”—are just as valuable in boardrooms and negotiating tables today.
However, those abilities are also experiencing a societal recession as political polarization grows, and screens and devices threaten to erode the “soft skills” spies, and the rest of us, can use to get what we want.
Watch Hurewitz’s interview with GZERO’s Tony Maciulis for more on what world leaders can learn from spies, what he thinks of President Donald Trump's skills as a salesman, and how artificial intelligence is impacting the traditional world of espionage.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI, Rama Duwaji, MIRA NAIR, MAMOOD MAMDANI during an election night event at The Brooklyn Paramount Theater in the Brooklyn borough of New York, US, on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025.
Last Tuesday, a self-identified democratic socialist who ran on making New York affordable for the 99% won the city’s mayoral race in a landslide, defeating former Governor Andrew Cuomo. And the reactions have been predictably hysterical.
Some critics are claiming that Mamdani will impose Sharia law and turn New York into Venezuela. Business leaders and billionaires are warning about a mass exodus. The Washington Post editorial board sees "class warfare" on the horizon. And President Trump, never one to waste an opportunity for confrontation, is threatening to cut federal funding to the city.
Everyone needs to take a breath. Yes, a 34-year-old Muslim who's never managed anything bigger than a state assembly office with five staffers just won the most powerful mayoral job in America on a platform of free buses, rent freezes, universal childcare, and soaking the rich. But most of that isn’t going to happen. Why? Because the mayor of New York City, for all the pomp and circumstance of the office, has remarkably little unilateral power to do... well, almost anything.
Let’s start with the most basic and binding constraint on Mamdani: money. The city is legally required to run a balanced expense budget each year, meaning that every dollar the mayor wants to spend on new programs has to come from somewhere else – either budget cuts elsewhere or new revenue.
Mamdani has proposed increasing the top corporate tax rate from 7.25% to 11.5% and levying an additional 2% tax on incomes over $1 million to fund his ambitious agenda. But – and this is key – the mayor of New York can’t raise income or business taxes on his own. The power of the purse belongs exclusively to the state legislature in Albany and requires Governor Kathy Hochul's signature.
And Hochul – a centrist Democrat who was Andrew Cuomo's lieutenant governor – has already ruled out tax hikes. "I'm not raising taxes at a time where affordability is the big issue," she stated flatly. Not surprising given that New York already has a combined top marginal income tax rate of 51.776 percent – the highest in the nation. Mamdani could raise property taxes with City Council approval, but that wouldn't solve his problem – property taxes don't discriminate by income, hit middle-class homeowners and co-op owners who've already seen taxes skyrocket, get passed through to renters, and wouldn't raise nearly enough to fund his agenda anyway.
What does this mean for free buses? Mamdani made this a centerpiece of his campaign, but it’d cost the Metropolitan Transportation Authority $630 million annually in lost fares, and the mayor doesn't control the MTA – the governor does. To make buses free, he would need to get either the City Council to approve funding replacement or the state to pony up the money.
What about universal childcare? The mayor could operationally run such a program, but funding it would cost $5 billion annually – requiring either massive budget cuts elsewhere or tax increases he can't authorize and Albany and Hochul won’t. A $30 minimum wage by 2030? Can't do it without the state legislature. Building 200,000 affordable housing units? That would require borrowing $70 billion, $30 billion more than the city's debt limit – and Albany’s approval is needed for that, too. Are you starting to see a pattern?
Even the rent freeze – probably Mamdani’s most viable promise – would face challenges. Yes, the mayor appoints the Rent Guidelines Board, and there’s precedent for political appointees freezing rents. But the RGB is supposed to follow economic indicators or risk lawsuits, and it doesn't always do what the mayor wants. Crucially, even if Mamdani gets his freeze, it’d only cover about one million rent-stabilized apartments – not market-rate units, condos, co-ops, or the thousands of newer "affordable" units governed by federal and state regulations.
What can Mamdani do? He can make buses faster through dedicated bus lanes and Department of Transportation enforcement. He can open city-run grocery stores through the Economic Development Corporation, which already operates retail food operations, for relatively little money. He can reorganize the NYPD to create an Office of Community Safety, even if a full department would need City Council approval. And he can use new charter amendments passed in November—which reduce City Council and community board veto power over housing—to accelerate private development, even if he can't fund the government-built affordable housing he promised. Not nothing, but not exactly a socialist revolution.
The good news is that Mamdani’s tenure doesn’t need to be revolutionary to be successful. Fiorello La Guardia had it right when he said, “There is no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage.” There isn't a socialist way either. What most New Yorkers will care about when they go back to the polls in four years is whether their mayor kept the subways running, the trash collected, the schools functioning, and the streets safe. That’s what the job is largely about, and why the mayor’s real power isn't passing laws or raising taxes but appointing hundreds of commissioners and department heads and managing the 300,000-person workforce that runs city services. Here's where a truly radical mayor could do real damage: hiring incompetent ideologues and cronies to run the NYPD, the Department of Education, sanitation, emergency management, and so on.
Given Mamdani’s lack of an administrative track record, the jury is still out on whether he will govern as an ideologue or a pragmatist. But the early signs are encouraging. His transition team is heavy on people with actual records of accomplishment. He’s talking to experienced hands like Maria Torres-Springer, who's served multiple mayors and knows how to get things done at City Hall. He’s expressed a desire to keep Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, a widely respected technocrat whom business leaders and moderates trust. And in his victory speech on Tuesday night, Mamdani quoted his defeated opponent’s dad Mario Cuomo about campaigning in poetry but governing in prose, signaling that he understands the job ahead will take more than just slogans.
The real risk isn't that Mamdani will turn New York into a socialist hellhole, but that he won't be able to accomplish much of anything at all. This isn't some low-tax, low-spending jurisdiction where a progressive can open the spigots and transform society. New York already has some of the highest taxes and spending in the country. But the problems that actually make the city so unaffordable – entrenched public unions with ironclad contracts, overregulation, a bloated bureaucracy – have no easy fixes and are mostly beyond any mayor's control.
We've been here before. When progressive Bill de Blasio won the mayoralty in 2013 on a very similar “soak the rich” campaign, the same people predicted an apocalypse. Crime would explode, the tax base would flee to Florida, and the city would enter a death spiral. De Blasio made many mistakes during his eight years at Grace Mansion, but none of that (save for crime going up during the pandemic, not just here but everywhere) came to pass. New York remained New York: dirty, noisy, expensive, still the greatest city in the world.
I don’t know if Mamdani will be a good mayor. But people who've been predicting the death of New York for forty years still haven't learned that betting against the city is a sucker's game. We’ve survived far worse than an inexperienced progressive mayor with big ideas and limited power. And if you look past all the pearl-clutching, Mamdani’s victory reveals something far more interesting about where American politics is headed.
Mamdani ran a left-wing populist campaign focused almost entirely on one thing: affordability. He didn't win on identity politics or progressive social policy or democracy or Trump's corruption. He won by speaking to New Yorkers’ economic anxiety while mostly avoiding the more polarizing cultural issues that alienate moderate voters and tear the Democratic Party apart.
And here's the thing: economic anxiety resonates far beyond New York. Yes, the city's electorate is younger, wealthier, more educated, and less white than the rest of the country. These people are particularly concerned that they and their children won't have the opportunities their parents had – whether because of inflation, housing costs, student debt, AI displacement, or disillusionment with capitalism. But voters everywhere are angry at a system that feels rigged for the rich and powerful, less meritocratic capitalism than kleptocracy. That grievance is not exclusive to liberal urbanites.
Just as Trump won by convincing Americans that democracy was broken and he alone could fix it, expect to see a wave of left-wing economic populism that mirrors right-wing Trumpism but comes from a completely different place. Neither the current Democratic establishment nor Trump himself – who's abandoned "drain the swamp" for pay-to-play corruption – is positioned to capitalize on this energy.
It won't be Mamdani either. His Israel-Palestine and identity-politics positions don't play nationally like they do in deep-blue New York (frankly, neither do his demographics). But his economic playbook will. The candidates who can speak most credibly to economic anxiety and promise to disrupt a captured system – without the culture-war baggage – will have an edge in 2026 and 2028.
- What We’re Watching: Far-left upstart wins NYC mayoral primary, NATO members to boost defense spending, Iran nuclear damage in doubt ›
- Why Mamdani’s win matters ›
- How Israel made it onto the ballot in the NYC mayoral race ›
- Now the real work begins ›
- What Zohran Mamdani’s win really signals for US politics ›
- Zohran Mamdani and America's political future ›
A fruit and vegetable stall is lit by small lamps during a blackout in a residential neighborhood in Kyiv, Ukraine, on November 6, 2025, after massive Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure in October.
As a fourth winter of war approaches, Russia is destroying Ukraine’s energy grid faster than it can be rebuilt. “We lost everything we were restoring,” Centrenergo, one of Ukraine's largest power operators, said on Facebook following a devastating weekend assault that reduced the country's energy capacity to “zero.”
Since Sunday, most of Ukraine has been plunged into intermittent darkness as the government schedules rolling blackouts to preserve what little power remains. Russian drones and missiles have pummeled power plants, substations, and gas infrastructure in a relentless campaign that has intensified as temperatures drop. Further complicating the situation, Ukrainian authorities charged senior energy officials with a $100 million kickback scheme – which has outraged the public and raised concerns that graft could ward off desperately needed energy assistance from the European Union.
“Since the start of the war, Russia’s main objective in attacking civilian energy infrastructure is to demoralize the population and inflict economic damage,” says Eurasia Group analyst Dani Podogoretskaya. The targets extend beyond power facilities to hospitals, apartment buildings, schools, and kindergartens – all aimed at breaking Ukrainian resolve.
More than three years into the conflict, the strategy appears to be working, at least on paper. Some 69% of Ukrainians now say they are ready to settle for a negotiated end to the war, up sharply from just 22% in 2022. “This is exhausting for Ukrainians,” says Eurasia Group Russia expert Alex Brideau. “They are resisting, but it is taking a toll.”
Yet, with Vladimir Putin showing no signs of coming to the negotiating table, Ukrainians are simultaneously growing more resilient and resigned, adapting their lives to sustain the war effort. Many have purchased small generators to keep the lights on.
Ukraine's military isn't surrendering to the initiative either. Though far less frequent than the strikes they endure, Ukrainian forces have landed attacks deep inside Russia, targeting its energy infrastructure to bring the war home to ordinary Russians. “[This weekend’s] strikes have reinforced the imperative of fighting and winning,” says Podogoretskaya.
A chill across Europe. Ukraine’s energy crisis won’t remain contained within its borders. As the country’s ability for power generation collapses, it must turn to European neighbors for electricity and gas imports — a shift already reverberating through EU energy markets strained since Russia’s invasion.
The pressure is showing up in prices. German baseload electricity for January 2026 delivery has climbed nearly €10 per megawatt-hour in recent weeks, now exceeding €105/MWh and up from €94/MWh in November. Ukraine’s increased demand for imported power will continue pushing regional prices upward as winter deepens.
But the longer-term consequences may prove even more significant. Russia’s systematic destruction of Ukrainian energy infrastructure has poisoned any remaining prospects for cooperation. The idea of resuming Russian gas transit to Europe through Ukrainian pipelines – once a cornerstone of the continent’s energy supply – is now politically dead.
“Any transit arrangement would be viewed as rewarding Russia's deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure,” says Podogoretskaya. Ukrainian politicians, energy officials, and security experts are united in their opposition to serving as a conduit for Russian gas after watching their power sector and domestic production facilities reduced to rubble. This stance will shape European energy policy for years to come, cementing the EU’s pivot away from Russian energy dependence – even as the costs of that transition continue to mount.
