Last Sunday I met up with a group of young people in Glasgow for a pizza. Over lunch we got into a very interesting discussion about how technology is taking over their lives and dominating their future.

A bit of context: this was a group of six young people who have either completed Working Rite’s employability programme and are now in work, or are in the process of finishing the programme with a job. The youngest is 17, the oldest 21. None of them went to, or had any aspiration of going to, university. This, often overlooked segment of society, who left school at 16, are the young people who motivated me to start up the charity in the early years of the millennium.

They, and everyone they associate with, has a smartphone. Even though they tend to come from families where money is pretty tight, for these young people a smart phone is a must – even more so since the pandemic. Without one they wouldn’t be able to take part in life as it is.

I found it encouraging to hear how conscious they are about their smart phone addiction. It was interesting to discover their various approaches to factoring in moments of escape from digital dependency. A couple of them said that they were lucky to have jobs which required them to switch the damn thing off at work, but when they switch it back on, they are sucked straight back into the vortex. What’s more, they all agreed that their attention span has declined massively over the past few years.

It still seems weird to me that a phone can become so powerful. Of course, we know that the phone bit – voice-to-voice exchanges in real time– is benign. It’s the rest; the assault of apps and virtual interactions that we increasingly refer to as: ‘artificial intelligence’, that is where the problem resides. I don’t like that label. It’s way too flattering for something so sinister. As far as I’m concerned, from a drone to a smart meter, they’re all robots!

It feels to me like we are witnessing the restructuring of the human experience. We are increasingly allowing the outsourcing of our lives. Robots are now managing our memories, our choices, our relationships, counting our steps, and telling us who is at the front door when we’re on holiday. Robots are deciding what and who we should be interested in. Robots are sabotaging our self-esteem by enticing us into binge-browsing other people’s creations and achievements, instead of cultivating our own human imagination, free from robotic interference.

They just won’t leave us alone, constantly competing for our attention, and in the process, training our minds to keep wanting more. It is the indefatigable march of the Now-ist society where the next thrill is but a swipe away.

This is the world our young people have been born into. They didn’t have a choice, and they have to be able to navigate it at a level of competence that I will never get even close to; nor do I want to. This truth took me back to when I was that age. The backdrop to my childhood and early adulthood was the Cold War. The atrocities of the Vietnam war were being played out every night on the TV. I remember thinking this war will never end – let alone that the Berlin Wall would ever crumble.

That’s the beauty of those years – the post-puberty decade when adulthood beckons. A decade to make your mark; to make choices that will become your future. The Cold War didn’t stop me throwing myself into the act of living. Yes, I joined the odd demo, and adopted causes that I have stayed loyal to, well into my retirement. But just like the young of today, the important things back then were practical – a job with decent money, a home, maybe a car, good friends and the pursuit of love and happiness.

Civilisation depends on this age group, their convictions, their energy, even their righteousness. Who else is going to fight our wars, create new cultures and test permissions? But I do have my fears that the tech onslaught of the robots is having a numbing effect on the very experience of childhood and adolescence. In the post-puberty decade, the brain is in its peak development phase as the neurological wiring for adulthood is being constructed. This means that the young adults of today were exposed during their childhood, at a time where the brain is at its most malleable and suggestible, to the first significant advance of the robots - the smart phone – launched in 2012.

Of course, with all this talk of robots, I start to imagine a sci-fi world; something like a blend of The Matrix and The Terminator. But there is another story, written in 1895, that, for me, speaks to the core of my concerns: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, turned into a pretty decent film in 1960.

Wells’ hero builds his own time-machine and travels some millions of years into the future. Initially he is enchanted by the innocence of the versions of human beings he finds, dwelling in fields and tents and seemingly living a life of care-free leisure. They call themselves ‘Eloi’. But he is confused by the absence of any evidence of productivity. They have a language, but it’s very limited and doesn’t seem to extend to actual conversation. Each individual exists so introspectively and without apparent care for others, that when one of them falls into a river the rest of them just turn away and continue with whatever they were doing.

Then he discovers a parallel civilisation living underground: the ‘Morlocks’. He concludes that they too are humanoid, but their noisy, busy, and thriving society exists in sharp contrast with that of the Eloi. The big reveal about the nature of their relationship happens when he sees the Morlocks emerging above ground at night - then it all becomes clear. Above ground is not some idyllic paradise- it is a farm! The Eloi are in fact the Morlock’s livestock, docile creatures dragged below ground as needed for tomorrow’s lunch.

This future land demonstrates the tragic trajectory of the intervening years leading to the split of the human race: one element in control, and the other providing the food. On his return to 1895 he recounts his adventures to his friends. He expounds his theory as to why this rupture in the evolution of humanity has occurred: one half has become idle pleasure seekers, whilst that the other half does all the work and makes all the decisions.

I see troublesome parallels at work between Wells’ nightmarish vision and our modern-day world, where the evolution of AI could potentially furnish us with a separate controlling species, and render humanity redundant, reduced to idle livestock.

At the end of the time traveller’s tale, our adventurer sums up what the future he has seen means for the fate of the human race. He closes his novel with some haunting words which could equally apply to an impending dystopian future of our own creation: “I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide.” ■