𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

There was a time when teachers in British schools felt a little disenchanted by their pupils’ ambitions. Years ago, teachers lamented that their students wanted to be influencers and video game streamers. Now the situation has changed again, and this time it’s undoubtedly for the worse.

Last week, I spoke to a teacher who told me their brightest pupil had asked them a question they could not answer. What, the student wanted to know, should he study to do when he left school? Over the past two years, he had watched AI write essays, code software, diagnose illness and paint pictures.

At the young age of just 17, nobody in his school, and nobody in his Government had the faintest idea how to respond. This week, Andy Burnham told him he should build a train, learn how to fix a roof or sort out his mate’s plumbing.

His pitch will no doubt resonate well with parents worried about the future of their child. Boiled down, the hope is Britons can out-run the machines by retreating to jobs they cannot yet do.

This is the self-same gospel of upskilling preached by successive governments for as long as I can remember, predicated on a hope that change will catch up if you run away fast enough.

In fairness to Burnham, he is at least seeking to grasp the upheaval this technology is bringing.

His rivals offer equally false promises to the young. The Greens are pressing for us to surrender entirely, hand every citizen a Universal Basic Income, and tax the rich to pay for it. Again, an extremely popular idea. Why not tax the super-rich to pay for the lives of those whose jobs they have replaced?

This is a bribe, a monthly allowance in exchange for stepping quietly aside while the wealthy consolidate their ownership of the machines that will run everything else.

Like a growing number of political pledges, this is a fantasy in which the meek inherit the direct debit and the powerful inherit the future.

Those accelerating toward tomorrow without a thought for it brings, as well as those seeking to upskill their way out of the crisis or bribe their way beyond it, are missing the point.

We are hurtling toward a world in which our relationship with machines is flipped upside down.

They can already write letters, forge photographs and imitate our voices. We live in an increasingly online world where personal and interpersonal relationships are conducted behind a screen, which is breaking the link between people.

In England alone, 8.9 million of us were prescribed a form of antidepressant in 2024/25, a figure which has been steadily increasing for years. Meanwhile, roughly 25% of young adults report a mental health condition, up from 10.1% in 2017.

As the advent of the mass uptake of AI crashes around us, the link between honest work and a dignified life may be broken for millions. We are preparing our children for none of this. Despite the pace of change, we are still measuring ourselves by GDP and employment statistics as though the coming decade will look like the last one.

It will not, and a society that continues to raise its young to be productive, and only productive, is a society preparing them for redundancy.

There is another way – one in which we teach children to think critically rather than rely on a machine to do it for them. In which we ask students across British schools what makes a good life, not merely a productive one.

What we owe to each other, and to the places we come from and how to think clearly when the machine writes fluently. How to live with meaning when the market no longer asks for our labour.

That is the conversation no party is having. Until one of them starts, no amount of train-building will save us.