During its bitter fight against the militants, the Afghan government must have received thousands of such reports. What made this one so special was its provenance: not the drones and informants of its friends in the world’s greatest superpower, but rather Raven Sentry, an AI-enabled warning model designed to predict insurgent activity. 

Developed in 2019, while US negotiations with the Taliban were still underway, Raven Sentry was built to maintain situational awareness in Afghanistan after the final withdrawal of foreign troops from the country. “We were looking for ways to become more efficient and to maintain situational awareness”, says Colonel Thomas Spahr, a professor at the US Army War College, adding that Raven Sentry would “enable” the Afghans to continue the fight after Nato had flown home.

The details are classified, but Raven Sentry apparently proved successful in Jalalabad, even as it stymied several other attacks as well. In the end, though, the programme was terminated abruptly, about the same time as democratic rule in Afghanistan, amid the chaos, fear and bloodshed of Kabul International Airport. Yet what Raven Sentry achieved that day in July 2020 could yet transform warfare — if, that is, the technical and ethical hurdles don’t prove too high.

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Militaries have experimented with AI intelligence for a while. As far back as 2017, the US launched something called Project Maven to help analysts process large amounts of data. Yet if Maven relied on sophisticated object-recognition software, Spahr equally stresses that human officers remained “central” to the process. 

Raven Sentry was different. Gathering together a range of data — social media messages, news stories, significant anniversaries and even weather reports — it could then predict places at risk of insurgent attack. “Neutral, friendly, and enemy activity anomalies triggered a warning,” Spahr explains. “For example, reports of political or Afghan military gatherings that might be terrorist targets would focus the system’s attention.”

Despite America’s eventual failure in Central Asia, meanwhile, Afghanistan proved an ideal testing ground. That’s essentially down to what Rafael Moiseev calls Afghanistan’s data-rich environment. “AI is only ever as good as the data that trains it,” explains the AI expert. As Moiseev continues, Nato’s 20-year odyssey in Afghanistan meant there was plenty to go on, from historical attack data to anecdotal evidence from Spahr and his colleagues. The graveyard of empires even offered lessons from the Cold War, with Raven scooping up content from the Soviet occupation in the Eighties.

Just as important, Raven sharpened its predictions over time. Like other algorithms, it could first scour unclassified databases, before honing in on what mattered — useful when so-called “OSINT” data is now a global market worth $8 billion.

All told, this comprehensive approach proved successful. As Spahr says, Raven spotted some 41 insurgent attacks across five Afghan provinces before they actually happened, usually offering warnings of about 48 hours. And by October 2020, less than a year before Raven would abruptly be wrapped up, analysts had determined it was firing out predictions with 70% accuracy, even if humans were crucial to its success too.

Raven Sentry is only one example of how AI has transformed war this century. Aside from being a predictive analytical tool, after all, AI technologies also boast what Polly Scully calls effective and ethical applications elsewhere. “In the broadest sense,” explains Scully, who heads Palantir’s defence and national security work in the UK, “it has the power to dramatically lower the technical proficiency required for personnel to engage with large amounts of data in sophisticated ways, in order to make better decisions.” 

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To explain what she means in practice, Scully refers to the use of AI in improving battlefield awareness, something Palantir’s been working on. She notes that algorithms can analyse how appropriate particular aircraft — and their bombs — are for striking targets. “AI,” she adds, “has the potential to transform logistics too.” Among other things, it can keep artillerymen informed about how quickly gun barrels are wearing out. From there, Scully adds, the computers can tell manufacturers to build spare parts. 

Examined from the other end of the barrel, Moiseev says that AI can cut casualties by enabling the deployment of autonomous machines on the frontline, with actual troops safely orchestrating the battle from the rear. This isn’t some Terminator fantasy either. Earlier this year, the Ukrainian military deployed about 30 “robot dogs” against its Russian foe. Though not totally autonomous, the so-called Brit Alliance Dog (BAD2) can explore trenches, ruined buildings and other areas drones struggle to access. 

The Ukrainians have also experimented with autonomous machine guns, as well as drones that use AI to identify and attack enemy targets. In the Middle East, meanwhile, and in an echo of Raven, it was recently revealed that Israel used an AI programme called Lavender to designate close to 37,000 Palestinians as Hamas targets.

Yet as the catastrophic civilian casualties wrought by systems like Lavender imply, battlefield efficiency and wartime morality are two very different things. Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “Godfather of AI” and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, warned about the “possible bad consequences” of the technology — noting especially that robotic killers may one day move beyond our control.  

It hardly helps, of course, that some of AI’s most ardent enthusiasts are arguably less than perfect. Though Scully unsurprisingly emphasises the ethics of Palantir’s platforms, her company has faced scrutiny over how it collects and uses data, while also apparently inviting young children to an AI warfare conference. That’s before you consider its murky relationship with the US government, with Palantir also causing controversy over its work for the NHS here in Britain. 

Yet these challenges aside, Moiseev is ultimately confident that few people want to see society torn apart in a future ruled by killer robots. “Rather,” he suggests, “we should be developing AI to prevent and resolve disagreements.” In a broader sense, meanwhile, predictive AI can be used to not only foil attacks, but also respond to conflict and help civilians. Whatever the question marks around Palantir, it is currently using AI to help de-mine over 150,000 square kilometres of Ukrainian fields.

And what about that future hinted at Jalalabad? Could AI predict some future conflict? Moiseev thinks so. As he says, though the invasion of Ukraine came as a shock to most, a team of scientists and engineers based in Silicon Valley had already predicted Russia’s move almost to the day — even months before the war actually began. “There is often a wealth of signs that a conflict is on the horizon,” Moiseev adds, “whether unusual movement at missile sites or a sudden stockpiling of critical materials. The problem is that humans aren’t very good at spotting subtle clues. But for AI, that is one of its greatest strengths.”

No wonder US decision makers are hoping to use AI to analyse data to spot any future Chinese actions around Taiwan. Certainly, Admiral Samuel Paparo, a US Pacific Fleet commander, has implied as much. As he recently told a defence innovation conference, the Pentagon is looking for ways to “find those indications” of an imminent assault by the People’s LIberation Army. Given, moreover, that any eruption in the Pacific could occur without warning, experts have argued that AI could equally improve overall the general readiness of US forces year round.

Then there’s the question of whether the computers could be outwitted, by some enemy eager to retain a modicum of surprise. Tellingly, this may happen via even smarter machines, potentially millions of times more powerful than regular supercomputers. Quantum machines could analyse enemy movements in a second, smashing through their encryption.

It would be reckless, though, to let computers take complete control. As Spahr says, war is ultimately fought by men and women, meaning we can never allow an “automation bias” to cloud our strategic judgement. Given how his country’s adventure in Kabul ultimately ended, that’s surely sound advice. 

Let’s start with TikTok, which the major political parties have only recently discovered, creating their accounts once the election was called. The appeal here is obvious: three-quarters of 15–to-24-year-olds, and two-thirds of 25-to-34-year-olds use TikTok, making it an attractive route to the attention of young voters.

But look at their numbers and it seems unlikely that the platform will swing the result. The Conservative Party has 61,000 TikTok followers, which pales in comparison with the number of votes they need to win over, while Labour has almost 200,000 followers, a straightforward reflection of its younger support base. As for Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform may appear to be the exception, amassing more than 673,000 followers and a number of fan accounts, some with tens of thousands of followers. It’s impressive, given that Reform supporters tend to be much older than the average TikTok user. But by contrast, Sky News has six million followers, and BBC News 3.4 million. Yes, stories about the election will circulate on the platform, but will it be a deciding factor? It seems unlikely.

Similarly, nor is this an AI election, at least not in the sense that AI-created deepfakes are distorting public perceptions. While “disinformation” campaigners like to warn about the dangers of audio deepfakes fooling the electorate, there is very little evidence of this taking place. This isn’t surprising, when you consider that AI is mostly used as a tool to analyse voter data and target us with more-or-less personalised content. It’s a handy gadget that makes campaigning easier, but, again, there’s little evidence to suggest that it’s swaying the election.

That said, obviously this is a data election, in the sense that most of the parties’ campaign spending is going into the selected digital content we encounter online and in our social media feeds. Some of this content is made for sites that don’t allow political advertising, such as TikTok. The rest is mostly paid digital advertising through Meta and Google, which has, so far, cost the Conservatives over £850,000, and Labour over £2 million.

But this isn’t new. In 2016, Cambridge Analytica became a bête noire for journalists and commentators seeking explanations for the Brexit and Trump votes. Accusations of sinister manipulation followed, as Cambridge Analytica’s bold claims of being able to psychologically profile each individual voter were taken at face value by people who had only just discovered something that had been happening for years.

In truth, the techniques of profiling voters, targeting them with tailored messaging, and measuring their effectiveness had already been honed in Barack Obama’s two successful election campaigns in 2008 and 2012. It was Jim Messina, the brain behind Obama’s digital campaigns, who then helped the Conservatives win the 2015 UK election by targeting, not just key constituencies, but key persuadable voters within those constituencies.

Almost a decade later, simple geography has continued to dominate targeting in the early stages of this election. Google only allows the use of postcode, age and gender for political advertising, but the Who Targets Me analysis of spending on Meta also shows that over half the parties’ total budget in the first week went on location-specific adverts. This makes sense: why target a seat where your candidate has no chance of winning? Or conversely, where your candidate is vanishingly unlikely to lose.

The Liberal Democrats, especially, have focused their digital resources on some key constituencies that look winnable from the Conservatives, with Facebook adverts that name the local candidate, shown only to voters in that constituency. It’s not that different from shoving leaflets through doors, except that it’s cheaper, doesn’t rely on volunteer legwork, and shows in real time which target voters respond. Smaller parties have also poured digital spend into target seats — notably the Greens in Bristol Central, and Reform in Great Yarmouth.

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Parties can narrow down the audience further within a geographical area: by age, for example (around 10% of Meta adverts defined age-related targets). More specifically, advertisers can choose a Custom Audience, consisting of contacts already acquired through other means. If you responded to the Conservative Party’s 2021 survey on Pet Theft, for example, you may also have checked a box agreeing that the Party can use your email to contact you again about other campaigns. Around a quarter of the early campaign Meta adverts were aimed at a Custom Audience.

The disadvantage of this approach is that you will only address people already on your contact list. To reach voters who might be receptive, but who aren’t already on the list, advertisers on Meta can request a Lookalike Audience of profiles that resemble a Custom Audience. Around 20% of Meta ads in the first week of campaigning were targeted at a Lookalike Audience. The Conservatives were most likely to use Custom and Lookalike audiences early in this election campaign. More of Labour’s spending, by contrast, went through local candidates.

But who did they target? Labour’s 2023 Issues Survey makes providing contact details optional, but notes in the small print that those details may be used to keep in touch about policy development, compared with “other information we hold about you”, including what you might have said to a doorstep campaigner. It will, however, “be analysed in anonymised form” and not used to “re-contact you for electoral purposes”. In other words, they’re keeping this data not to target you, necessarily, but to improve the models they use to target others. This suggests a sophistication of targeting that, like the Conservatives’ 2015 strategy, can deliver surprising results simply by focusing campaigning energy where it has most effect.

Today’s transparency rules around political adverts mean that Meta’s Ad Library should show the parties targeting very specific groups of voters with very specific messages. Indeed, Labour’s adverts do show such targeting. One video ad tells the story of a man called Nat who waited “over 100 days for cancer treatment” — shown to 45-to-65-year-olds living in the “sniper alley” of potentially fatal disease onset. Another, teaching assistant Amanda’s explanation of “why she’s switching from Tory to Labour this time”, was seen mainly by women (traditionally more concerned about education and healthcare). Both also fit the genre of relatable individuals telling the story of their own political journey.

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What of the Conservatives? When the election was called, their digital campaign had three themes: Clear Plan vs No Plan, “Starmer needs you to vote Reform (so please don’t)”, and immigration. After a week, a range of adverts attacking Keir Starmer, or asserting that Labour would make everyone £2,000-ish worse off, were added to the campaign.

But then, between 3 and 7 June, all Conservative digital campaigning stopped. There weren’t even any clips from the TV debate — despite it going well for Sunak. You might expect them to return a completely new strategy, in response to Farage’s return and the D-Day gaffe, but no: When advertising resumed on 7 June, the main messaging was the disputed £2,094 extra tax claim, and warnings against giving Labour a bigger majority by voting Reform or LibDem. There’s little sign of a Clear Plan from the Conservative online campaign team, but that’s not surprising given the disarray of the campaign overall.

And nor is it surprising given their digital form in previous elections. In 2019, Labour vastly outspent the Conservative party on digital campaigning. The Lib Dems, and third-party groups (mainly pro-EU groups) also spent far more than the Conservatives or the Brexit Party. Labour’s messages were shared widely, watched by millions — and failed to win them the election.

What mattered, it turned out, was not methodical data-gathering, the creation of engaging digital content, or mobilising supporters to share it with their friends and contacts. What mattered was offering the electorate something they wanted enough to vote for it.

In a close-run electoral race, canny use of data and ruthless targeting of swing voters in key constituencies can change a result. Microtargeting online messaging is a cheap and efficient way to do that, especially in an age when most of us spend so much of our time online. But to focus on the technology is to miss the bigger picture. Just as Cambridge Analytica did not explain Brexit or Trump, and ruthlessly efficient use of voter data didn’t explain Obama’s two terms, in 2024 it will not be TikTok Wot Won It. Not even for Nigel Farage.

It turns out it isn’t that bad. I actually don’t mind the time I spend mulling over my day with the warm, soapy water flowing over my hands, for once neither tapping nor scrolling. And it’s all been much easier since my flat-mate brought home a “Scrub Daddy” — not an obliging older boyfriend, but a grinning, all-American sponge.

Fear not: this isn’t the start of some trad-wife manifesto, calling all the hunnies back to the kitchen to be kept barefoot and pregnant. But rather, as technology and Artificial Intelligence take control of our everyday existence, to hail those mundane tasks which allow space for thought. As if we were to forsake them, what would we do instead? The chances are we’ll just spend more time in a high-tech trance: already, we spend nearly three hours a day on our phones, and even longer on laptops.

Consider the dreamy tranquillity of Vermeer’s muse The Milkmaid as she pours milk from a terracotta jug. While there is nothing to envy in her domestic servitude, there is something beguiling about how lost in thought she is while engaging in a mindless task. Her thoughts seem away: perhaps on a lover, or perhaps she has just struck upon the idea of oat milk. Such moments of serene reflection are vanishingly rare nowadays, as we whip out our phones to kill time as we sit on a train or wait for the kettle to boil.

Yet it’s not just our thoughts we are surrendering to technology; it’s our memory too. When my grandfather was a child, he was made to learn great chunks of poetry by heart. I by contrast, like my whole generation, have outsourced my memory to my phone, where I set reminders, keep phone numbers and compile vast to-do lists. Why bother to remember the words of the Bard — or even my new postcode — when I can look them up in an instant? And you can forget about learning a foreign language once we each have our very own Babel fish.

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I hear of small acts of defiance: one acquaintance is memorising everything that matters to him, from phone numbers and flapjack recipes to the most elegant of maths theorems. It might seem foolish — resistance is a little futile at this stage. But just because we can delegate our duties to machines, does that mean we should?

Unlike a human, AI can’t find fulfilment in the fruits of its labour. The sense of pride, identity and community so familiar to Philip Roth’s glove-cutters in American Pastoral is alien to the machines that replace them: “Though they considered themselves to be men more aristocratic than anyone around, including the boss, a cutter’s working hand was proudly calloused from cutting with his big, heavy shears. Beneath those white shirts were arms and chests and shoulders full of a workingman’s strength — powerful they had to be, to pull and pull on leather all their lives, to squeeze out of every skin every inch of leather there was.” These noble men were the last of their kind, soon to vanish into the pit of industrial decline.

But maybe there are finer ways to fill your days than a vocation. While AI doomers fear an age of melancholic unemployment, others preach a glorious utopia of unlimited leisure. In this future paradise, we will be liberated from the drudgery of work and chores. Our working days could be shortened, leaving us time to devote to higher things: family, culture, nature, charity, contemplation, amusement. We could revive and democratise the ancient Roman concept of otium, cultivated leisure practised by the elite. And thanks to a generous form of Universal Basic Income — supposedly to be procured through Sam Altman’s iris-scanning crypto Orbs — every one of us could become a lady or gentleman of leisure. It would be an aristocracy for all.

In this Eden, AI could bring an end to the tyrannical rule of Lord Time, which began with the chiming of medieval church bells and intensified during the Industrial Revolution with the invention of railway timetables, factory shifts and the working week. It was not long before every human breath was commoditised, deployed for maximum utility in the labour market. And rest became strictly defined and heavily regulated. Now, however, we could simply clock off.

But free time doesn’t necessarily translate into actual freedom. Who can afford to recreate the charmed existence of a Roman philosopher — all splendid villas and strutting peacocks? It’s more likely we morph into WALL-E-style consumerist marshmallows — all Deliveroo meals, Hinge and TikTok reels. We would live for dopamine kicks and little else.

How, then, might we balance the human desire for meaningful work with the need for AI-fuelled economic growth? Already, PwC has predicted that global GDP could be up to 14% higher in 2030 as a result of AI. Perhaps, with AI to grind away on our behalf, work will become a dalliance. Much as the appalling KidZania allows children to pay to spend the day pretending to work “jobs” for corporate sponsors in Westfield shopping centre, similar capitalist playgrounds might emerge for adults; we would pay for the satisfaction of doing a good day’s work: blowing glass, bricklaying, or writing a chapter of a novel.

We may, however, never reach such fantastical extremes. But the trick with AI is sensing when to stop. We should hold up every aspect of our lives to the light and wonder where AI could enhance or degrade our humanity. While inaction is the bête noire of humanity, it can sometimes be the wisest course; as Pascal wrote in 1654, “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”. For every AI innovation we discover, we should consider: what, exactly, are we saving all our time and effort for?

Barely anybody I still speak to from primary school remembers that fateful day, and thank god. Yes, I was teased for a week, but generally people forgot that I apparently “loved” another 10-year-old in my class (who was far more popular, hence the scandal). But what if that had happened now? Would videos of my beetroot-red face be plastered across TikTok and Snapchat? Would I ever have lived it down?

My generation was the first for which nudes rocketing around secondary schools, or the masterminding of toxic cyberbullying campaigns, was both commonplace and expected: one memorable Instagram burner account viciously tore into girls in my year, Gossip Girl-style, only for the culprit to eventually be caught out by a bungled double-bluff post. But since the passing of the Online Safety Bill in October, legislators have been taking stock of our saturation in all-consuming tech.

Only last week, the Education Select Committee once again sounded the alarm, reporting that one in four children use their phones in a manner resembling behavioural addiction. Ministers are now debating whether to ban under-16s from owning smartphones altogether — an extreme proposal which 33% of parents nevertheless support. The recommendations could not have come at a better time to circumvent the glacial pace of policymaking: as we await election manifestos, legislation on smartphones may well hitch a ride to becoming a governmental pledge, with the idea holding appeal for both major parties.

If it does appear on a manifesto, it will not be without a hitch. For the Conservatives, it may be tempting to see a ban, alongside the reintroduction of National Service and the phasing out of smoking, as part of a glut of boomer-friendly panic policies, directly mined from the resentments of village-hall coffee morning-goers. But in promoting a ban, the Tories would be pushing an instinctively un-conservative interventionism. For Labour, meanwhile, the unchecked power of Big Tech is an indictment of slack regulation of corporations — tick — but it also curries the least favour among the young, the party’s electoral home. Starmer’s decision to slash the voting age to 16 may backfire in a second-term election if the youngest voters are livid about being denied TikTok for 15 years of their lives.

Yet while the question of smartphone use can easily fall into a political storm drain, ministers should understand that any legislation it throws up is more than an election gambit. Like cigarettes and alcohol, it is fast becoming a public-health issue. In his new blockbuster book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt drew attention to the “selfie” function on smartphones and its deleterious effect on Gen-Z girls’ self-image, calling Instagram “unsafe at any speed”. But what is it doing to Gen A, the freshest crop of smartphone guinea pigs, born between 2010 and 2025?

My sister has two children, both toddlers. Like many stay-at-home mums, an important part of her day is going to the supermarket. I remember these times myself: me and my twin being plonked into our car seats, then sitting in Costa having a frothy milk while our exhausted mum glugged a 12-shot cappuccino, and finally getting to sit in the small compartment at the front of the trolley while we sailed through the aisles. (My sister, because she was better behaved, got the proper seat.) There was so much to watch and touch and smell; we’d go to the fish bit and grimace at the heads, or snigger in the bra section. Hardly Little House on the Prairie, but now this real-world interactivity seems quaint.

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These days, my correspondent tells me, trolley-seats are replete with zombified, glassy-eyed tots glued to Paw Patrol, Bluey or whatever else keeps them quiet. They aren’t babbling — just squealing when their phones or iPads are withheld. Their chauffeur — or “mum” — is often scrolling away herself.

Generation A scares me. And I suspect it may be because they have rarely known the value of being really, really bored. Boredom is such an integral part of childhood. Irritating parents tell us “only boring people get bored”. They expect you to spend an hour on your tod on a rainy Sunday and come up with a Picasso, that having nothing to do is a prerequisite for some incredible creative flourish. This isn’t true, and I don’t want to see your child’s art. But I do wish all children would know the crushing, annihilating boredom of being little with nothing to do, because it counteracts the cult of impulsive self-centredness which tells us that we must be happy and stimulated all the time. You cannot be. As a child, you must sit in excruciating boredom in assemblies, dentists’ waiting rooms, funeral services, MOT garages — so that being dragged around shopping centres or being dumped in a creche with other kids is a relative delight, not an unwelcome interlude to hours and hours of bed-bound scrolling.

We know smartphones are already affecting this. But what of the effects of technologies we know nothing about, which are developing so quickly that legislation can hardly get a look in? A recent thread on X drew attention to a worrying number of AI apps which claim to be able to “delete any clothing” or blend real photos with sexy composites — essentially a deepfake handbook, arming users with airbrushed breasts to append to real images of women or girls you know. “Crushmate” allows you to “chat with the girl of your dreams” who will “accommodate even your wildest requests”. “Talk about any topic with AI stepsister,” promises another, complete with an image undoubtedly compiled from 10,000 porn thumbnails. Why bother finding a real human being to undress, when you can blast your retinas with instantaneous, pornified and forever compliant facsimiles?

Something must clearly be done — but what? The problem with “banning” smartphones outright is that it almost definitely wouldn’t work. Age limits for social-media use, the key element at the heart of the smartphone issue, are almost impossible to enforce, and so easy to circumvent. ID verification techniques — which have been recommended for pornography — are seen as intrusive and risky for data protection.

Besides, there are good arguments against a blanket ban. Ian Russell, whose 14-year-old daughter Molly killed herself in 2017 after viewing suicide content online, wrote in The Guardian last month that he opposed an outright prohibition, calling it “naive”. “This would punish children for the failures of technology companies to build their products responsibly,” he said. As a result, the best the government may do at present is to issue guidelines which strongly recommend. This is already happening on a local level: last week, the headteachers of 20 of the 24 primary schools in St Albans signed a letter addressed to parents to urge them not to buy smartphones for their children until the age of 14.

But if childhood has been one of the first sacrifices on the altar of Big Tech, the “victims” themselves do not want salvation. “Children have told us that being online is fundamental to their lives,” wrote Russell. The NSPCC similarly denounced consultations for leaving children’s voices “glaringly absent”. And when outlets do consult them on the prospect of age restrictions, children express concerns about “controlling” parents infringing on their privacy, or mention easy workarounds like using VPNs. Young people’s knowledge of these routes underscores a fundamental problem with adults imposing such rules on children: their tech literacy is likely to be much higher than that of the legislators themselves.

The only realistic and sensible approach, then, and one which does not appear to trample on civil liberties, is to better regulate the companies cultivating addiction-like behaviours in children, and to approach smartphones like a traditional public-health concern: raising awareness, and putting rules in place so that at least sometimes — and certainly during school — kids are not on their phones.

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In February, the government issued guidance on schools’ individual policies on mobile phones, recommending prohibiting use with a firm foreword by Gillian Keegan. But how equally can this be enforced in schools with dramatically varying resources and teachers per pupil? Myleene Klass recently told The Times about volunteering in state schools, passing on her own parenting wisdom to children less fortunate than her own. One of these pearls was that phones must be kept in “magnetically locked pouches” at all times at her children’s private school. That this was spoken of as a novelty suggests that smartphones have taken their place among the many class-markers of modern Britain: a greater conscientiousness about the harms of tech obsession may, like healthy eating, be considered a luxury for those who have the time and money to strictly enforce or to provide satisfying alternatives.

Meanwhile, mental-health problems, like physical illnesses, are increasingly bearing down on the body politic — affecting worklessness, happiness and prosperity. Policy must reflect this, taking into account the clear and present risks of being “too online” to self-image, confidence and social cohesion. Cracking down on platforms’ age-restriction enforcement, limiting the harmful content available on those platforms (something which the Online Safety Bill was, on paper, meant to enact), and raising awareness among parents with something resembling a public information campaign might all help. Parents accept that drinking and excess junk food is bad for children; in time, social media will join these as something to be judiciously introduced, and enjoyed in moderation once the brain is developed.

I pity the children who have the thousand embarrassments of being young, like that day in the playground, reflected back at them by the funhouse mirror of the internet. But aside from electoral brownie points, what do the big parties have to gain by taking this issue seriously? Both main parties have, in the past few days, launched cringe-inducing campaign blitzes on TikTok — one by Labour compares Sunak poorly dribbling a football around some plastic cones with Starmer prancing around a pitch to the Match of the Day theme tune. What is certain is that this may be one of the most difficult policies to get right, and if social media can be a silver bullet for a successful bid for power, politicians are likely to continue to dance to its rhythm — even if on the edge of a volcano.

How can humans possibly keep up with all this new information? How can we make sense of the world if the volume of data exceeds our ability to process it? Humanity is drowning in an ever-widening galaxy of data — I for one am definitely experiencing cognitive glitching as I try to comprehend what is happening in the world. But being clever creatures, we have invented exascale computers and Artificial Intelligence to help manage the problem of cognitive overload.

One company offering a remedy is C-10 Labs, an AI venture studio based in the MIT Media Lab. It recognises that our ability to collect data about the human body is rising exponentially, thanks to the increasing sophistication of MRI scans and nano-robots. And yet a radiologist’s workload is so high she can’t possibly interpret all that data. In many cases, she has roughly 10 seconds to interpret as many as 11 images to judge if a patient has a deadly condition. It’s far quicker and more reliable to use AI which, in combination with superfast computing, can scan the images and find hints of a problem that a human’s weary eyes and overloaded mind might miss. This will save lives.

Yet AI is a greedy creature: it feeds on power. Last year, the New York Times wrote that AI will need more power to run than entire countries. By 2027, AI servers alone could use between 85 to 134 terawatt hours (TWH) annually. That’s similar to what Argentina, the Netherlands and Sweden each use in a year. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, realised AI and supercomputers could not process all this data unless we find a cheaper and more prolific energy source, so he backed Helion, a nuclear fusion start-up. But even if we can power the data, can we store or process it at this pace?

One answer to the storage problem is to make machines more like humans. As Erik Brynjolfsson says, “Instead of racing against the machine, we need to race with the machine. That is our grand challenge.” How will we do this? With honey and salt. Earlier this year, engineers at Washington State University demonstrated how to turn solid honey into a memristor: a type of transistor that can process, store and manage data. If you put a bunch of these hair-sized honey memristors together, they will mimic the neurons and synapses found in the human brain. The result is a “neuromorphic” computer chip that functions much like a human brain. It’s a model that some hope will displace the current generation of silicon computer chips.

This project is one part of a wider “wetware” movement, which works to unite biological assets with inanimate physical ones; organisms and machines. Yet the wetware movement sees DNA, not honey, as the ultimate computer chip: salted DNA, to be precise. The salt allows DNA to remain stable for decades at room temperature. Even better, DNA doesn’t require maintenance, and files stored in DNA are cheaply and easily copied.

What makes DNA so special is that it can hold an immense amount of information within a miniscule volume. “Humanity will generate an estimated 33 zettabytes of data by 2025 — that’s 33 followed by 22 zeroes,” says the Scientific American. “DNA storage can squeeze all that information into a ping-pong ball, with room to spare. The 74 million million bytes of information in the Library of Congress could be crammed into a DNA archive the size of a poppy seed — 6,000 times over. Split the seed in half, and you could store all of Facebook’s data.”

Yet even if — thanks to honey and salt — we can capture, store and process this fast-growing galaxy of data, what will humans do with it? Will we actually make sense of it? Put another way, does the human brain have a Shannon limit? The American mathematician Claude Shannon clocked that there’s a “maximum rate at which error-free data can be transmitted over a communication channel with a specific noise level and bandwidth”. Traditionally, the Shannon theory is applied to technology: a telephone line, a radio band, a fiber-optic cable. But Brian Roemmele argues that the human brain, too, has a Shannon limit — and that it is 41 bits per second, or 3m bits per second if it’s visual input. With the breadth, depth and speed of new information doubling all the time, can the human mind keep up?

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Probably not. The weight of all this knowledge is crashing against the limits of the human mind. We may be able to compress the whole of Facebook’s information to half a poppy seed, but can the human mind survive contact with that poppy seed? Perhaps not. Something’s got to give. It will be us.

The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan suggested this years ago. He thought that information overload changes how we think and act. When there is too much news to process, we stop assessing individual news stories and start analysing the source: I don’t trust it if it came from CNN; I trust it if it came from Fox News. Too much information makes us more tribal and less analytical.

Just as political tribalism is a human response to knowledge overload, so, according to Princeton’s Julian Jaynes, is consciousness itself. Jaynes argued that consciousness is simply a coping mechanism humans developed once we started living cheek by jowl in ancient cities in the 2nd millennium BC. The stress of managing interactions between strangers with very diverse cultural backgrounds, languages, and behaviours was so great that the human brain increasingly split the work into two hemispheres, the left and right lobes, and began to analyse and absorb. This was the beginning of consciousness: of listening to the voices in our heads, turning to metaphor to explain reality and developing the skill of introspection.

Later, Renée Descartes proposed another split. This time, humans would split the head from the body. The Cartesian Revolution ruled that the left side of the brain handles the serious stuff: logic, rationality and the scientific method. These endeavours were deemed worthy of our time and energy. The right-brain — which includes emotions, anything mystical or inexplicable or unprovable — was cast aside along with the body. The State got the decapitated head, and the Church got the body.

Now, AI is using its God-like powers to reunite them. With the development of AI and wetware, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the Cartesian era of human history. The split between the mind and the body no longer makes scientific or practical sense: humanity is increasingly knitting the two back together again and approaching reality more holistically (not that they were ever actually separate — we humans have always been wetware).

This realignment is changing the way we manage risk and uncertainty, for instance in financial markets. David Dredge, a former colleague of mine and the founder of Convex Strategies, argues that it’s not only the end of the Cartesian era, but also the end of the Sharpe World. For a long time, financial markets have relied on the Sharpe Ratio, which compares the return of an investment with its risk. But, in this new post-AI environment, that old measuring stick no longer works. Dredge refers to the concept of “Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table, you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.”

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In the post-AI world, it may be that all the data starts to fall into patterns, perhaps fractal-like repeating patterns. Our job won’t be to guess the price of the S&P or the Yen anymore but to rely on AI and supercomputing to tell us how all financial instruments are moving in repeated patterns over the course of time. We’ll stop focusing on price moves and start looking at the movement of the financial system as a whole. As Dredge says: “It is the divergence that matters and ever more so the greater the scale of the variation.” In other words, volatility at the global financial systems level is very different from volatility at the level of the US bond market. Perhaps this means in the future we won’t have specialists in US government bonds or British government bonds. Maybe we won’t even have bond specialists. Instead, we’ll have people who are reading the patterns of all financial instruments in all markets at once. This brings a whole new meaning to what we call global macro.

So, wetware-powered AI isn’t just about processing more information faster: it is about reducing uncertainty. Its rise will also profoundly change how humans think about the nature of reality — both in finance, and more generally. It will require humanity to delve into the subject of consciousness that hasn’t been considered worthy of study in the Cartesian era. The thinking nature of AI presents uncomfortable questions: is it sentient, or will it be? Will its decision-making supersede human decision-making? Will the volume of data overload mean that human minds can’t make sense of things that machines can understand perfectly? Will we eventually outsource decision-making to AI powered by neuromorphic chips that form a brain that is vastly better informed and more conscious and conscientious than any one human brain? This means letting go of the details and getting into the flow of this new emergent superhuman consciousness that moves faster than our minds.

Can we handle this reduction of uncertainty? Humans are upping their game all the time: we went from storing and sending data on megalithic stone carvings to computer chips with silicon substrates, glass substrates and now honey and salted DNA substrates. Accepting the gift of this emergent consciousness will change humanity. It will remind us that we humans are a fluid and emergent phenomenon ourselves. We won’t be specialists surfing within the web anymore, we’ll be polymaths surfing the whole of the web. This is more than a Renaissance. It is something new — and we are present at the creation. It’s a bittersweet moment: but change is happening, like it or not. AI demands not only nuclear fusion but a fusion of all our cognitive capabilities and consciousness, whether human or human-made. Only by improving the quality of our emerging consciousness, and the conscious qualities of our machines, can we hope to stay afloat in that ever-swelling ocean of knowledge.

After all, knocking technology seems to have been a collective New Year’s resolution for a certain sort of “psychologist”. Over the past month, global superstar Jonathan Haidt has been doing the rounds for his own new book, The Anxious Generation, warning how technology is “rewiring” children’s brains and “causing an epidemic of mental illness”. In a similar vein, author Abigail Shrier has been promoting her latest contribution, Bad Therapy, extolling the benefits of phoneless children. Certainly it’s a view that has found political currency on both sides of the Atlantic. Only last week, Florida’s Ron DeSantis signed one of the US’s most restrictive social media bans for children, while here in the UK the Government wants to ban phones in schools to improve educational standards.

It is into this fearful maelstrom that Etchells’s book enters, throwing down a rather unexpected conclusion into the mix.. Rather than spend page after page outlining how technology is corrupting Western children, he takes a more thoughtful view. Instead, he argues, “collectively, as a society, we have become too apprehensive — and even fearful — about screens”.

To justify this, Etchells explores the evidence for the harm caused by screens, and finds it unconvincing. Has screen time destroyed our attention span? Very unlikely. Does it interfere with adolescents getting enough sleep? Sometimes, depending on how and when the teenager is using the screen. Are smartphones destroying a generation’s mental health? It’s impossible to usefully answer such a sweeping question.

What studies have been done, he explains, are often small and poorly designed. They tend to rely on self-reporting, and elide correlation and causation. Some studies reported positive effects, or different effects for different groups. Building any kind of big picture is hindered by the fact that researchers are measuring different populations, different devices, different purposes, and different aspects of wellbeing or mental health.

Not enough evidence, then, but also no cause for immediate panic. Which raises the question: if no convincing evidence points to the harms of screen time per se, why are we so fearful of it? What does our unhealthy fixation on the power of technology say about us?

It’s true that young people, especially, are less happy, more anxious, and generally less able to cope with life than previous generations. A recent Resolution Foundation report found that a third of 18-24 year olds reported symptoms of poor mental health, and that one in 20 young people was prevented from working by ill-health. It’s also true that this rise in mental distress coincides with the spread of the internet, the smartphone and its seductive apps. But that doesn’t make for a simple, causal relationship.

Successive generations, let’s not forget, also have less independent time outside adult supervision, and fewer opportunities to take risks and initiatives for themselves. Kids first play outside when they’re a couple of years older than the age their parents did, and the kind of informal public spaces where their grandparents hung out together are turning into formal, privatised spaces for prescribed activities like shopping or organised sports. As Etchells points out, it’s fine to “talk about getting kids off their screens and ‘going outside’… but the reality is that, increasingly, there isn’t anywhere ‘outside’ for them to go”.

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With this in mind, the increasingly online lives of young people may not be causing the diminishment of in-person interaction, but they are responding to it. Instead of hanging out in the park, teenagers exchange messages, memes and videos from their respective bedrooms. For some of them, this is a lifeline; for others, it is a well of insecurity and a conduit for bullying. As Etchells notes, “the question is not whether screen time affects mental health or vice versa, but why do some people thrive online and others struggle?” The answer, so far, seems to be that those who struggle offline will struggle online too.

Nevertheless, the form of those online interactions is different from the pre-digital social world, for better and worse. Take poor, unhappy, teenage Pete Etchells, who was dealing with life events — the death of his father — that would make any normal person depressed, In a previous generation, he might have poured out his feelings to a diary that would remain unread by anyone else. Or, a few years later, in that screenless generation, he might have drifted to the college bar, found other lonely souls and formed friendships that might slowly reach the pouring-out-of-feelings stage. Instead, his LiveJournal blog found like-minded people who were going through similar trials, and formed an informal support community across the internet, a community from which he eventually drifted away as his life improved.

Such screen-mediated forms of interaction are not necessarily better or worse than the old forms: for today’s young people, forming identities online, experimenting with projecting different aspects of ourselves to see how others respond, is both more and less controllable. More controllable, because you can edit your words and pictures, select your selfies, and craft your side of a conversation, in ways impossible in person. Awkward flirtations can happen remotely, without the other person reading your body language as you decide what to say or send next. Different versions of yourself can be shown to selected audiences, and adjusted to fit their response.

Less controllable, because Etchells isn’t convinced that we can create our ideal persona online, because we are constantly giving ourselves away in a million tiny interactions. Constant connection is now the social norm: it’s hard to switch off from a wider social environment and devote all your attention to the people sharing your physical space, when that means missing out on the endless flow of interactions. Technology, in other words, has reshaped the division between public and private. Any private space is now, by default, connected to a whole social world at all times, making solitude, or even intimate space, the exception. Conversely, when anything digital can be shared, what was a private conversation may be made public, so privacy becomes a relative and contingent quality.

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It is not enough, then, to say that technology is simply not an issue. It is an inescapable part of our changing social fabric, for better and worse, and evolving with other social changes. But, as Etchells points out, that means we can’t look at our relationship with technology in isolation from those other changes.

Comparing the Screen Time panic with earlier iterations, like with video games in 1981 and even the trash literature panic of 1861, he notes a common assumption: “that we, as users, lack agency. It’s a form of technological determinism.” Like discussing food in isolation from the context in which we eat it — where and when, with whom, and why — talking about technology as an autonomous social phenomenon is perverse. Just like our eating habits, activities mediated by screens are still human activities. If our technology habits are not what we’d like them to be, we have to start with ourselves and our lives, not the objects of our habitual consumption.

This is why the “digital detox” is such an unhelpful approach. It frames our use of technology as inherently negative, something that takes over our lives so destructively that we must wean ourselves off it. But complete abstention, even for children, would be wildly impractical for most of us today. It would also mean losing all the positive aspects of technology: the convenience, the enrichment of our mental environment, and the myriad connections with other human beings that it enables. Etchells also notes the “puritanical undercurrent” of the digital detox, that regards the pleasure we take in much of our screen time as yet another reason to stop it.

Instead of using words like “addicted” or describing our brains being “hijacked”, we should be thinking about the content and context of our screen-mediated activities. When lonely teenagers talk to strangers online, the consequences depend far more on who they’re talking to, and why, and what else is happening in their lives, than on the hours of screen time they clock up.

As Etchells says: “We need to be more critical — not just of our own tech use, but of what we’re told about our tech use.”  It would be much easier to blame all the ills of the world on technology. But that narrative of powerful corporations and weak-willed humans is doing more than any FOMO-driven social media site to corrode our sense of agency, and our ability to change anything in the real world.

Then other people, often sophisticated progressives and libertarians convinced that the internet is a force for progress and liberation, performed triumphant Gotchas!” by reminding the world that “internet addiction” was invented as parody: the joke was on the fretful rubes. This wised-up view was dominant in mainstream (ie centre-left) commentary through much of the 2010s. Then, in 2016, Donald Trump won that big election, allegedly with the help of Russians making Facebook posts, and the elite consensus that the internet is a force for liberation sort of fell apart. Progressives grew more bullish about technology, which freed them to look at the apps on their phones and join everyone else in admitting that, yeah, this internet crap is pretty addictive.

This history says several depressing things about our intellectual class, but at least it has left us at a point where parents in the UK can start a movement against kids having smartphones without being accused of losing their minds to a “moral panic”. This campaign was spurred by a simple Instagram post from Daisy Greenwell, who said she was “terrified” of the idea of her two children getting smartphones before they’re even teenagers. “It feels like we all know this is a bad decision for our kids,” she wrote, but “we still all stumble into it because everyone else is, and it’s too hard not to follow suit.” After only 10 days, her movement was 5,000 strong: “We’re encouraging them to start setting up Smartphone Free Childhood groups in their schools,” she wrote, “which are popping up across the country.”

Her movement has been able to gain such strong momentum, without having its credibility immediately attacked by high-status commentators, because the evidence behind its driving worries has grown stronger in recent years. In the past, people have resisted claims about smartphones and mental health for sound reasons. After all, studies supporting the anti-smartphone case were largely correlational. In her 2017 book iGen, for example, Jean Twenge drew strong conclusions about the dire effects of smartphones largely from the matching of timelines — yearly increases in anxiety, depression, and suicide with yearly increases in teenage smartphone ownership and social media use. Critics noted that other factors could explain those changes in well-being. Some claimed that a closer look at the data showed much smaller, even negligible effects where Twenge had made strong causal claims.

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In the seven years since iGen emerged, however, the correlations between phone use and unwellness have stayed strong, while the holes that other scholars punctured in Twenge’s causal claims turned out to be smaller than they first appeared. At the same time, evidence for the slightly different claims about the distracting and compulsive effects of phone use have grown even harder to refute. These things, combined with the epochal vibe-shift caused by Trump’s election, have altered the balance of rhetorical forces in the tech debate. The rote response from pro-tech side, that people like Twenge were fuelling “moral panic” and anti-tech hysteria, started to sound pretty hysterical itself.

But focusing the debate about tech on mental health, though useful and urgent in obvious respects, is also a distraction from the more fundamental, more philosophical question of freedom, of human agency in the face of inhuman power. It was depressing to watch as influential writers and thinkers — progressives both of the traditional Left and (less surprisingly) of the libertarian Right, along with the professional cheerleaders of tech media — ignored this question in eager defence of this new, indifferent force that now ruled our lives.

Valorising technology, on the empty assumption that the work of corrosion and subversion and redefinition it is doing is emancipatory and progressive, became very hard to distinguish from worshipping power for the sake of how powerful it is. Enthusiasts were keen to read healthy tidings in the rise of the internet, and benefits both spiritual and political from the psychic and social changes it wrought, even though the clearest, the most potent, the only obvious claim that it could make for itself was one of brute ontology. It was an emergent phenomenon of singular scope and reach and gravity. But its spokespeople continued to read its effects as progressive, to insist it was doing humanity’s work. They continued to mock those who publicly worried about its dangers, even as its growing power to remake everything, by its own inner logic, and on behalf of the most profitable companies in the history of capitalism, was growing ever more flagrant.

As I watched this dynamic play out over the second decade of this third millennium, I found myself thinking: wait, aren’t writers and intellectuals and academics supposed to be vigilant and skeptical about power, especially power working on behalf of capital? So why, every time someone goes public with a reasonable worry about the singular and rapidly growing power of digital technology, is that person mocked by sophisticated professionals of the intellectual class for fueling another “moral panic”. This term was so popular it grew, over the history of commentary on the internet, into a sort of authoritative cliché, a peremptory move by with-it pundits that conveyed a regime enforcer’s mix of swagger and dullness.

My favourite version of this comes from a Guardian review of Tim Wu’s 2016 book The Attention Merchants, which waves off Wu’s claims that internet degrades our attention and concentration. “This is an ancient complaint,” the reviewer assures us, “and a rather silly one. Every media innovation since the invention of writing has triggered a moral panic about whether the human experience would be hopelessly corrupted as a result. Socrates agonised about wax tablets; the monks of the late middle ages railed against the printing press.” Anyone who knows anything about what happened after the invention of the printing press might find the blithe tone of this passage somewhat befuddling. And to invoke 15th-century monks bearish about the printing press as your special avatars of irrational fear is, one might say, a counterintuitive use of history. The printing press was a vector of world-breaking power, especially from the monk’s perspective. To the extent that they really were in a moral panic about it, we should treat those monks as models of foresight.

As someone who likes books and wasn’t killed in the Wars of Religion, I have a positive attitude about the printing press myself, but I have to admit it that it did unleash cataclysmic forces that still shape us six centuries after it (understandably) bummed out those monks. The internet hasn’t yet given us its Thirty Years War. For now, it conducts its more salient and systematic upheavals on smaller human scales – society, community, family, individual self, and various subconscious workings and proclivities of that self. Indeed, this power seems to move relentlessly towards smallness, as if some law of subdivision or dissolution secretly guides it. This applies both to the objects it conveys to our awareness and the aspects of our awareness it conveys them to. Using ever smaller packages of experience it teases ever simpler human instincts, reflexes ever further removed the whole selves we present to one another in embodied life. With every advance it reaches deeper into evolutionary time, discovering and exploiting reflexes we share with ever-simpler creatures, our stone-age ancestors, their primate forebears, and then monkeys, and then rats.

A recent post by the American blogger Ted Gioia captures how this logic applies to the objects of culture. Under the influence of Silicon Valley, he argues, culture is getting “faster”, by which he means cultural products are growing shorter and the human capacities they appeal to more reflexive, less human, more pathological. Under the heading “How Silicon Valley Views Culture” he presents the technological history of culture in the style of a food-chain illustration in a child’s science textbook: a fish-shape named “Art” being consumed by the fish-shape “Entertainment”, which is consumed by the fish-shape “Distraction”, which, finally (for now), is consumed by the fish-shape “Addiction”. In another graphic, titled “The Rise of Dopamine Culture”, Gioia captures various cultural enterprises on their downward trajectory towards elemental smallness and crudeness. Here are a few:

Journalism: Newspapers->Multimedia->Clickbait

Music: Albums->Tracks->TikToks

Athletics: Play a Sport->Watch a Sport->Bet on a Sport.

You might take up an easygoing attitude about tech and say “What’s the big deal? Longer entertainments are not inherently better than shorter ones.” But that belief — wrong as it is — gets harder to hold once you reach the one about sports and betting. This example should be a chilling sign of the perverse moral power of technological affordances over our ability to set norms and rules for ourselves and live by them — seeing how quickly the emergence of phone-based betting apps has dissolved longstanding, clearly reasonable, and fundamentally humane scruples about sports gambling.

Betting on sports has gone from an ethically dubious and legally ambiguous diversion accompanied by massive downside risks that everyone recognises, to a ubiquitous feature of sports advertising that celebrities feel no apparent shame in promoting, and which sports teams and leagues feel no evident misgivings in exploiting for profit. Gambling was already dogged by the risk of ruinous compulsion even before it was technologically fused with phone apps whose mere mechanical use is meant to be compulsive. A sports-fan turned compulsive gambler through compulsive scrolling on his addictive-by-design gambling apps — I think the business term for this is synergy. The philosophical term for technology’s ability to effect this sort of moral revolution is: power.

One admirable thing about the movement of UK mums is that they take up this matter of power with admirable stoutness and directness. Sure, they indulge in a little safetyism in their online manifesto — but less than I would have expected. Perhaps because they’re parents and want to resist what phones will do to the inner workings of their families, their articulation of “The Problem” is surprisingly political — concerned as much with unfashionable matters of will, freedom, and personhood as it is with the familiar issues of anxiety and depression.

The manifesto begins with not a predictable warning about mental health (that’s the second heading) but with the obvious (and yet still quibbled-about with brain-dead reference to “moral panic”) point that “Smartphones are Highly Addictive”. It points out that “[t]ech companies spend millions on making apps and devices intentionally addictive”. For anyone who has spent time researching the cognitive-science end of the technology business (companies such as “Dopamine Labs” and other the Stanford-trained practitioners of “behavioural design”), or for anyone who’s read Natasha Dow Schull’s Addiction By Design, it’s clear that the tech industry has a dark vein of misanthropy running through it. The fact that this force of hating people informs the design of products that children use for hours a day should justify a constant, contrary state of disgust and alarm among parents, whatever the latest studies tell us about depression. Other headings in the mum’s manifesto include “Smartphones Reduce Attention Spans” and “Smartphones Rob Children of Their Childhood”. These points express a basic parental concern about what kind of life their children should live, and what kind of person their children should be.

My wife Juliet and I had these thoughts in mind when we held off on getting our daughters phones until the end of their American middle school years. At this point they were both 14, the only kids their age they knew who didn’t have phones. During those last phone-free years, their avid reading was beginning to grow in sophistication. They had lived in their Harry Potter worlds in earlier grades, but as middle-schoolers, along with the gripping kid-with-cancer romances that make up today’s YA canon, they were diving into longer, more difficult fiction, serious, award-winning novels written for adults. Then, after we gave them the phones they’d long been clamouring for, their recreational reading of books basically ended.

We are considered techno-puritans in our world. I’ve been theoretically suspicious and personally cranky about technology for many years, and Juliet, who has always been indifferent to tech gadgets and averse to the consumer worship of them, is a strong, steadfast anti-tech influence on our daughters. She has far more emotional stamina and far deeper tolerance for parent-daughter conflict than I do (but, as a school counselor, she’s an expert at making her points about technology without hectoring). When we gather our daughters’ phones at 10pm every weeknight, we assume we’re just practicing what everyone already knows about kids and phones and sleep. But when we let on to other parents that we do this, they are often astounded. Literally no one else does this.

And yet our anti-tech vigilance isn’t nearly enough. There’s always a reason for them to be tethered to phone and laptop until the very last minute. This points to tech’s power in the home, the no-win dilemmas it introduces into the job of raising kids. Household regimes of tech-rationing that keep devices turned off for designated hours are hit with constant exceptions and requests for exceptions. These make for a stream of irritating negotiations in the short run that, in the long run, undermine those regimes altogether. But a more ad hoc approach — “Okay, everyone, there’s too much dumb scrolling going on! Hand over your phones for the next two hours!” — is simply an invitation for open confict. You want a calm respite from compulsive behaviour, but you end up with two hours of argument and resentment.

In other words, when kids’ social worlds are completely mediated by smartphones, and when their phone behaviour has grown as compulsive as its designers mean it to be, imposing tech limits within individual households is a volatile, unpleasant, generally futile business. The blunt, no-defiance, “authoritarian” parenting style I was raised by would be much better suited to our domestic tech challenge than the “authoritative” parenting we’re obliged to use. We calm, reasoning parents are no match for the barrage of facile but exhausting complaints and counterarguments generated by the tech-teenager nexus.

This household dilemma has an analogue in the study of children’s tech use. On his blog, the Yale psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, has a helpful discussion of the difficulties scientists face in measuring the effects of tech use on the mental health of children and teenagers. In many cases, scientists have simply surveyed kids on how much time they spend online and then sought connections between time spent online and mental health outcomes, or compared kids who are offline, for whatever reason, with the much larger number who are online. Even when such studies show some negative effects, Haidt argues, these effects are probably understated. This is because offline and low-use kids are still living in a world where everyone they know is constantly, cognitively hooked up to a smartphone. So these offline kids are experiencing the cohort effects of whatever is passing among their online friends and acquaintances, plus the isolation effects of losing this one crucial and nearly universal means of socialising, plus, if their tech use is habitual, some substantial short-term hit to their well-being from having this habitual behaviour interrupted. It’s not surprising that studying the harms of tech use in this way would show weak effects at the individual level.

This analytical problem points us back towards a practical problem, what, in a discussion of the specific risks of social media for girls, Haidt calls “a trap — a collective action problem”. “Each girl might be worse off quitting Instagram even though all girls would be better off if everyone quit.” Both studying the problem and doing something about it are thus hobbled by the powerful network effects that digital technology generates, how it turns itself into an entire ecosystem seemingly all at once, entangling us in practical and social imperatives we didn’t choose and can’t opt out of without substantial cost. (I just took my son to a professional basketball game, for which our “tickets” were active bar codes I needed my iPhone to display. As the ticket service informed me, “Your phone is your ticket.” When I fantasise about ditching my iPhone, I have to consider things like that.)

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Daisy Greenwell’s understanding of her problem as a parent seems trenchant in this light. It was in her initial Instagram post that she made the bleak observation, ”[W]e all know this is a bad decision for our kids.” But we make this decision anyway. Why? Because the network effects of digital technology throw us into a collective-action problem. Do you want a no-phone son who misses all the online texting and planning and gaming his friends are doing, as my 13-year-old son is presently missing those things? Do you want a no-Instagram and -TikTok daughter who misses out on the meme-culture that all her friends consume and inhabit, as my daughters did for several years? If not, you better make the bad decision, get your kid that phone that, once it takes up residence in your home, you know you’re going to hate.

And, in this light, her practical response to her dilemma as an individual parent is also wise: start localised movements, where parents can tackle the collective-action problem together, on workable scales. As Jonathan Haidt suggests, achieving phone-freedom on these scales is likely to be both healthy and clarifying, to yield better-adjusted kids and a better understanding of the cohort-level changes in happiness and habit we owe to smartphones. These will be natural tests of something that, so far, has been both hard to escape and hard to study. My only criticism is that, so far, Greenwell and her fellow mums seem shy about extending this experiment to older kids, teenagers who might really benefit from a cohort-level break from smartphones.

As it happens, Juliet was witness to a natural experiment like this recently, when she chaperoned a 10-day high school science trip on which the students were forbidden from bringing their phones (and from which one student was sent home for sneaking his phone in his bag). These kids, aged 15 to 18, slept in small cabins without TVs and so were forced to entertain themselves and each other with conversation, board games, and book-reading. As the trip began they were clearly uneasy without their phones, but they stopped itching for them after a few days, and, by the end of the trip, they were all expressing, unbidden, how much happier and calmer they were without their phones. They saw how life without phones differed from their lives as they lived them at home, naggingly networked into the collective action problem they know as teenage living. When, during their return trip, a massive storm stranded them in Los Angeles for two days, and all 11 of them had to cram into the house of one boy’s grandparents, they experienced this stressful detour as a collective adventure, with more board games, conversation, and, now, back in civilisation, horror movies they watched together. Many of these kids began this trip as strangers and ended it as friends. It takes almost nothing — for a parent of phone-age kids, especially — to imagine how different it would have been if they were holding phones in their hands the whole time.

Before I picked Juliet up from San Francisco International, she’d told me we’d be giving a ride to one student, the 16-year-old son of one of her colleagues. On the way back to Oakland this boy mentioned several times how happy everyone seemed on the trip, how easy it was to get to know each other under those conditions. At one point Juliet asked him if he was relieved to be going home to his own bedroom – after 10 days of doing fieldwork and sleeping in a cabin and being stranded in L.A.

“I’m actually kind of dreading it,” he said.

“Why?” Juliet asked.

He said – I swear to God he actually said — “Because that’s where my phone is.”

A couple of weeks after the switch, a bill of around £1,000 arrived on her mat. She had only been living in her new home for a few days. For weeks, then months, Jan emailed and phoned. She spoke to customer service bots, payment teams, even engineers. She created accounts and new passwords. At one point a new customer account offered hope, before another £1,000 bill was autogenerated. The Bill remained; nothing could shift it.

The case is unresolved. One computer-literate family member has dedicated dozens of hours to The Bill, but still it looms. Nothing and no-one can win an argument with the automated system. Months of Jan’s life have been consumed by this; and her confidence in dealing with any kind of technology is now irreparably damaged.

Jan is a victim of “techno-admin”: it’s a pervasive phenomenon, whereby we customers are forced into infuriating, confusing, absurdly time-consuming and bleakly unrewarding tasks by a machine. You probably have a similar story. How many incorrect bills, unprocessed address changes, reminder notices printed in error? How many sleepless nights? It is the scourge of our age.

It’s all over the news, too. The energy company EDF recently issued artist Grayson Perry with a £39,000 monthly electricity bill, which to a machine seemed like a perfectly normal £38,700 increase on the previous one. Perry spent three tedious hours fixing it. And of course, there is the Post Office Horizon scandal: techno-admin at its cruellest. At the sharp end, postmasters were incorrectly told by Fujitsu’s accounting software that they were in arrears, and the Post Office subsequently hounded them, ruining hundreds of lives, careers, and reputations. At the softer end, thousands endured hours of stressful, fruitless phone calls and complaints. All because the people in charge found it easier to trust a machine than ask difficult questions of their own organisation.

More from this author

This is how democracy dies

By Jamie Bartlett

We are all sub-postmasters these days: each of us daily dealing with computer systems which make our lives harder. How much of your workday is taken up with tasks like the following: filling in a lengthy online form, which crashes just as the finish line draws near; spending hours trying to cancel an online subscription; coming face-to-face with the dreaded “Schrödinger’s account”: you try to sign into an it using your email address, only to be told there is no such account; you try to create a new account with the same email address, and you are told one already exists.

These are rarely the consumer’s fault. Companies make errors, which you end up paying for. When Hackney Council was the victim of a ransomware attack a couple of years back, the service disruption was well-documented. Less discussed is the amount of techno-admin imposed on the borough’s 250,000 residents as a result. The fact that legitimate organisations routinely make such enormous mistakes makes it a lot easier for criminals to operate. I know of one person whose number plate was ‘cloned’: someone is driving around with his registration on their car, and this poor chap has spent hours appealing fines because ‘the system’ can’t or won’t recognise that it is not actually his car.

And last week, I spoke to a fraud professional who told me his son-in-law’s identity was stolen by SMS fraudsters who pretended to be his phone provider. They re-registered his number, got into his mobile banking and tried to take out loans in his name. After two months of effort, he still hasn’t got his old mobile number back. It’s unfair to blame the victim: many banks insist on some text-based communications, although they aren’t as secure as people assume. It won’t be long before everyone is terrified of answering their phone, lest it be a sophisticated scam.

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Why is my chatbot hitting on me?

By Kathleen Stock

Could the UK’s productivity problem, which has flatlined since 2010, be partly caused by the surge in techno-admin? Large firms use automation and digitisation to cut staff and reduce overheads, especially when it comes to customer service — but what they have actually done is outsource the admin work to us, the customer. We are the ones now form-filling, changing passwords and fixing mistakes. We are the ones paying to sit in a telephone queue for an hour. And don’t forget techno-admin has to be carried out during work hours, because lines close at 6pm.

Forcing us to do techno-admin doesn’t even save the companies much money. One business processes specialist I spoke to explained that the moment things are automated and digitised, complicated software is involved. Which means that whenever there is a problem, you need high-skilled and, therefore, well-paid staffers. Or you need to call on the software providers — the Fujitsus of this world — which just adds more layers and delays and expense. This is probably why the UK’s chief auditor recently claimed that the government could save £20 billion by — among other things — modernising its IT systems. In the NHS, outdated IT systems are thought to have contributed to multiple deaths.

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The horror of deepfake nudes

By Nina Schick

“Automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency”, claims Bill Gates, but “automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” In other words, automation mostly works when you can standardise inputs and outputs. But humans aren’t a Ford factory production line: we’re messy and things go wrong all the time.

In the coming years, more decisions and tasks will be outsourced to ever smarter AI: decisions relating to spending, sentencing, military tactics, housing allocation. But ever fewer people will understand how any of these systems actually work. Staff won’t dare to question them.

Picture the frictionless future of ubiquitous smart machines: you head downstairs in the morning to make a coffee when — oh! The smart coffee machine needs a software upgrade! Unfortunately, you’ve lost your account details, and cannot recall which of your 25 email addresses you signed up with in the first place. But no time to fix that now, because you are struggling to log into the kids’ remote homework platform. Apparently, your laptop needs a new app, which will only work if you download some other software first. In the meantime, the bank’s been in touch with an urgent fraud warning — at least, the voice on the line sounded like the bank, but who can really be sure these days — so now you need to change all your passwords.

It won’t be long before simply living will be a full-time job. And at that point, UK productivity will finally hit zero. Then, and only then, when the economy has collapsed into a black hole of rage and wasted time, might we rebel against the pointless, painful scourge of techno-admin.

The Manchester-based project features in a fascinating article by Jocelyn Kaiser and Ann Gibbons for Science magazine. Basically, the UKB is a massive database containing the standardised, searchable medical details of half a million individuals. Crucially, it includes genetic information:

“From 2006 to 2010, the UKB enrolled 500,000 people aged 40 to 69 through the United Kingdom’s National Health Service… Investigators sampled their blood and urine, surveyed their habits, and examined them for more than 2400 different traits or phenotypes, including data on their social lives, cognitive state, lifestyle, and physical health.

“The blood samples yielded DNA for genomic analyses…”

This rich and extensive source of data allows researchers to uncover all sorts of correlations between different genes, medical conditions, behavioural traits, lifestyles and life outcomes. Though correlation does not necessarily imply causation, it does help identify promising avenues for further research.

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Letting the gene genie out of the bottle

By Peter Franklin

It’s not just what’s in the database that makes it special, but also how easily researchers can get information out of it:

“The crucial ingredient, however, may be open access. Researchers around the world can freely delve into the UKB data and rapidly build on one another’s work, resulting in unexpected dividends in diverse fields, such as human evolution. In a crowdsourcing spirit rare in the hypercompetitive world of biomedical research, groups even post tools for using the data without first seeking credit by publishing in a journal.”

Are the UKB and its funders (which include the Wellcome Trust and the UK government) missing a trick? Why not commercialise such a valuable data source instead of giving it away?

That, however, is a very low dimensional way of thinking, one that ignores the benefits of sharing:

“‘The U.K. is getting all of the world’s best brains’ to study its citizens, says Ewan Birney, director of the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, U.K., and a member of the UKB’s steering committee.’”

It also burnishes the reputation of the UK as a world centre of excellence in bioscience – not to mention a place where the ultra-patient investments of the public voluntary sectors can happily coexist and cooperate with those of the private sector.

Not so long ago, open access, or ‘open source’, was the buzzword of the digital age and “information wants to be free” its motto. The success of operating systems like Linux and websites like Wikipedia seemed to provide all the proof needed that open source was the future.

But that was before the likes of Facebook and Google showed how ostensibly free services could be used to build trillion dollar businesses on the basis of relentless data extraction and commercialisation. Indeed, in controlling data flows, they have essentially privatised whole chunks of the internet, creating gated marketplaces in the process.

Thus as well as its direct contribution to scientific research, the UKB also serves as a vital reminder that profit-hungry data-hoarding is not the only way.

With the giants of Silicon Valley pushing into healthcare and technological progress increasing the speed and affordability of harvesting genetic data, can the UKB model hold out? In the era of ‘the quantified self’ will we surrender our medical data to the tech giants as easily as we’ve surrendered our social and consumer data?

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Is Amazon's attempt to disrupt the healthcare industry heroic or villainous?

By Peter Franklin

There are reasons to hope that Britain in particular can hold back the tide. As well as an impressive range of private, public and independent research institutions, there is our trump card: the National Health Service.

Like all healthcare systems, the NHS is riddled with various inefficiencies and dysfunctions. It should not be above criticism, but even the NHS-sceptics ought to recognise just how well-placed it is for the era of biomedical big data.

Firstly, it is a national health service – a single organisation, providing a broad spectrum of healthcare services to a large and diverse population. Though the data already in the UKB is immensely valuable, it represents a tiny fraction of the potential resource.

Secondly, the NHS is trusted and loved by the people it serves. That goodwill means that, as a nation, we’re willing to help as well as be helped – for instance, by giving blood. I doubt that millions of us would be willing to donate our erythrocytes to a commercial concern. It is the same goodwill that could persuade millions wore us to become data donors.

Thirdly, the NHS provides an answer to concerns about how our medical data might be used – and especially our genetic data. The nightmare is that if the genes of every individual were to be sequenced and recorded, a ‘genetic underclass’ would emerge – denied affordable medical insurance because of what’s in their DNA. The NHS, however, is free at the point of need to every citizen regardless of genetic inheritance.

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How Dr Internet got smarter than the real thing

By Peter Franklin

Long-term projects such as the UKB also have a reassuring record of anonymising and protecting its donors’ data. According to Kaiser and Gibbons, organisations accessing the UKB have to “sign a legal agreement not to try to reidentify any participant”.

This good practice needs the full backing of the state. British policy makers should be striving to establish the UK not only as the world leader in medical big data, but also in medical confidentiality. The two objectives may be in tension with one another, but they also need to be reconciled. The more that law-abiding citizens can be confident that their own genetic information will not, and cannot, be used against them, the more they will be ready to share it with scientists.

Ultimately, genetic research depends upon genetic privacy.