It’s been more than twenty years since I wrote my first YouGov column and this is going to be my last. You and I have addressed pretty much every subject under the sun in those years. I have asked for your thoughts on everything from the relatively trivial – the price of tickets at pop concerts – to the greatest questions confronting our nation and, indeed, the planet – from climate change to war. So I’m tempted, in this last column, to try to bundle everything together and ask if you feel the world – specifically this country – is a better place in which to live now than it was a generation ago.
The problem with that ambition is defining ‘better’.
For many of you it will depend on whether you are better off financially than you had hoped or expected to be, or whether you are worse off. It might depend on your state of health and how you feel you have been treated by the NHS; or the state of our schools, or our transport network, or the many cultural changes we have faced – once again for better or for worse.
You might welcome unreservedly the rapid and massive transformation in the way we ‘consume’ our news. (Remember when 'consuming' meant eating!) When did you last sit down to watch the Ten O’Clock News on the BBC rather than glance at your phone to catch up on the latest developments in the big story of the day? And as for the major news developments of the past twenty years, what has left its greatest impact on you or caused you the greatest concern? Maybe Brexit? Or maybe our many changes in government? Do you feel more or less reassured that our democracy is working?
And what about immigration? Are you one of those who think the cross-Channel dinghies have had a terrible effect on our way of life, or that diversity and multiculturalism can only make us a stronger society in the long run? Cities like London are among the most multicultural in the world.
Then there are the social changes which would have shocked my parents to the core but which have now become commonplace – partly because of the new laws introduced to make them legal. Same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights may sum that up.
Major legal and social advancements have taken place. In 2014, same-sex marriage became legal in England, Scotland, and Wales and signalled a significant shift in our attitudes towards LGBTQ+ rights. Our country has also witnessed hugely changing social attitudes on issues such as race and gender and climate change. Movements like Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion have become a part of the landscape. Have you welcomed them or feared them?
But perhaps you are most concerned with what is happening beyond our shores and has the potential to change or even destroy our way of life. At the risk of stating the obvious, the greatest threat our civilisation has faced over the millennia has been the threat of war. In these last few years, that threat has been growing on many different fronts.
We have had many discussions on this site about how we should have reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Whether we have done too little to help the Ukrainians or even too much given the risks and given the terrifying ambitions of Putin. Specifically how seriously should we take his threats to use battlefield nuclear weapons if we make it impossible for him to achieve those ambitions with conventional force?
And Ukraine is not the only foreign conflict that should scare us. After many years of relative peace (I stress ‘relative’) the Middle East is in turmoil again.
The immediate threat is all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah, but lurking ominously in the background is Iran. The experts agree that its nuclear programme is at the stage where it could produce enough enriched uranium for five nuclear weapons within a matter of weeks if it so wished.
This is an area in which I think it safe to say that virtually all of us share a common view. We agree that any use of nuclear weapons is a truly terrifying prospect. The consequences of any escalation would be quite literally unimaginable.
So let’s return to what has been happening in our own country and ask whether we can agree on the single development that has been responsible for the biggest change to our way of life since I was born back in the 1940s. And bear in mind that I write as someone with children and grandchildren when I offer you a single phrase that I believe validates that change.
That phrase is: ‘the younger generation’.
You may say that’s a bit of a cop-out. Surely every generation brings about changes that affect the country in which they live? Always have and always will. Quite right too. And I would agree with that. But isn’t Generation Z different? Hasn’t it broken the mould like no other previous generation?
As we all know, Gen Z are those born between 1997 and 2012. They are at the forefront of nothing short of a revolution that has, to a greater or lesser extent, affected the lives of every one of us. And that is for the entirely obvious reason that they have mastered a technology that has changed our lives in almost every way imaginable.
That’s not because they were born with any special gifts that were denied to us oldies. It is – and I suspect you’re ahead of me on this - because of what older people (like me) think of as the ‘digital revolution’. That, of course, is not how they see it. To them it is a way of life rather than a revolution. They have never known anything else.
Over the past 20 years, the rise of the internet, smartphones and digital technologies has revolutionised daily life. We have access to more information, entertainment, and services than ever before. Remote work and e-commerce have become mainstream, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic confined so many of us to our homes. Only last week we discussed in this space the extraordinary rise in WFH: three initials that would have meant nothing to an earlier generation. Now working from home is becoming the norm in much of commerce and even industry. To many oldies it challenges the very essence of ‘having a job’; to Gen Z, the reaction is more likely to be “So what? A job’s a job”.
And then there is the birth of social media. Its creation has changed everything.
It’s just twenty years since Facebook was founded – originally for students at Harvard University. It’s reasonable to suggest that social media, combined with the staggering technical development of the smartphone, has brought about the greatest revolution in communication the world has ever seen. Many of us struggle desperately to keep abreast and many of us fail. But any resistance to the onward march of the digital juggernaut is futile. And to members of Gen Z it is simply absurd.
It is true to say that there has always been a gap between one generation and another. Human progress makes that inevitable. But isn’t this digital gap unlike anything history has ever witnessed?
You may have noticed that I have made no reference so far to AI. That’s because none of us can even begin to imagine where it might take us over the next decade, let alone the next twenty years. But we can be certain that Gen Z is better equipped to deal with it than us oldies.
Roger Highfield, the science director of the Science Museum, has written an influential book with Peter Coveney called Virtual You. It examined the case for a digital twin, which could revolutionise medicine and, failing that, the afterlife. He says we are now in an era of computational neuroscience and the possibility of hybrid humanity and he adds: “As your human cells disintegrate what will be left is your data. Virtual You examines the prospect of simulating virtually every organ and process, which can help with computational biomedicine. It starts with a quote from the premiere of the film Virtual Humans at the Science Museum: ‘Imagine a virtual human, not made of flesh and bone but one made of bits and bytes, and not just any human, but a virtual version of you, accurate at every scale, from the way your heart beats down to the letters of your DNA code.’ If we were to assemble a virtual you, we would want clues to your personality or what some might call your soul. Opening up your smartphone is the first step.”
Does that scare you as much as it scares me? Or perhaps you think I have exaggerated the significance of the digital revolution and there have been other developments over the years I have been writing this column that are more likely to keep you awake at night.
Do let us know. And many thanks for all of your contributions to this column. They have been enlightening, intriguing and often good fun.
