To feel sad watching all these kids going to school

To do this though, you need to have a job which is in demand in those places, and which also has a measure of security, so you are unlikely to find yourself out of work a year after buying a house.

owning property doesn’t make you happy or unhappy

It depends what you want in life though. In my 20s I was more than happy to rent. I didn't want to settle down, I didn't want to have to think about plumbing or mortgages. In my 30s it was a very different story. Having to move every year, never feeling settled, not being able to put down roots or make a home feel your own, became genuinely life limiting.

I have a friend with 4 kids who had a great deal on her rent, she and her partner made the house beautiful and they were just down the road from the school. Then one day the landlord decided he wanted to up the rent by 20% and their whole life was turned upside down. It's no way to live.

There’s a hugely widening wealth gap developing. Those young people whose parents are now inheriting large property wealth so can afford to gift large deposits or buy their kids properties outright and those who will never be able to get on the property ladder or will have to wait until they’re late 30’s.

My eldest 2 dc (teacher and engineer) have bought houses in their early 20s by going to places where property is affordable.

I don't have an "attitude". I would love to see more girls go into trades, but if we want this to happen, we need to look at why they don't.

I'm pretty sceptical about the claim that employers "struggle to find staff" when not a single one of them even so much as offered me an interview (and I've done cleaning and cash-handling jobs before).

Not even when I passed the Tesco test.🙃

I worry more about my children potentially growing up under a government that is anti-Immigrant, nativist, will gut public services even further, and probably make life harder for women. But I know what you mean. The future looks a lot bleaker than it did even when I was graduating just after the 2008 recession.

But because we don't know what jobs they'll do or what skills will be useful in the future, I'm going to be encouraging my kids to be as open to ideas and curious as they can. There has been a lot of talk about encouraging children down quite narrow, strictly vocational paths (learn to code! do an apprenticeship!) but transferable skills and a capacity to learn are likely to be more important than ever - this is the same for trades and professional jobs. DH and I are both quite unusual in that we got jobs we trained for and have been - and likely will be - in the same industries the whole of our lives. Amongst our friends, the pattern is much more mobile - between sectors, roles, going back to training.

Why do you think that home ownership is central to happiness? I was 35 before I had a mortgage — owning property doesn’t make you happy or unhappy, it’s just another commitment. Your post is laden with assumptions about what is essential for a fulfilling life and I think those assumptions are deeply subjective and mainly false.

We don't have true AI, just some limited pattern-matching rubbish spitting out semi plausible junk, and so many people are already outsourcing their thinking to it. You may as well let PacMan or Donkey Kong run your life for you.

The kids who know how to read, think and truly write will be a truly precious commodity.

& many girls are fit, strong & able to look after themselves as well as any boy.

my last plumber was female & the last boiler inspection was done by a woman.

neither of which I 'chose' as they were sent by the companies I chose.

The boiler inspector was in her 30's & very feminine, as well as fit (physically)

the main reason trades aren't seen as 'desirable' is because of attitudes that 'girls' don't do these jobs, you might want to look at your attitude, because it won't change until these attitudes are buried with the dinosaurs.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. Hoping ds gravitates to something AI proof like a trade of some description- my feeling is that a lot of other kids will be thinking the same thoughts.

@HelenHywaterThe rental system is what it is because we don’t build enough homes to rent! When tenants bought the council homes they were not replaced. Not by Labour or anyone. That’s the problem and Labour have done next to nothing in a year. They are not getting homes built in London any more than others could. So reform housing by all means! No houses - no reform!

I would too, especially if they were boys - unfortunately, trades aren't seen as desirable jobs by girls, some are still misogynist, some involve going to people's houses alone, and some require physical strength...

That’s unrealistic for the majority of people though. There won’t be many countries that will be open to those without specific skills/qualifications. Obviously there will be some but they won’t be the type of countries the youth of today would chose to go to.

To get in to ten likes of Australia and Canada is beyond difficult for the majority.

The problem with the UK is that the people want to have an office job and a big house and to trail that way forever without any effort. Where do you get that ideology from, lol. Life is hard. The UK is no way different or special and the people who presented your country to the world as an endless money pit now betray you right, left and centre

This is why I raised my girls to be educated but humble to the bone and take for granted only that they will need to do a physical job for survival. Thankfully this worked as desired, they got angry with me and ambitious, graduated, came here and married one a British quiet posh man, the other half British- half Czech men.

I agree with this. The young need to be fighting for reform to the rental system in the country instead of whingeing on about how they will never be able to afford a house.

As for AI making life unbearable, every generation faces a situation where they believe their life is more difficult than the generation before and that the job situation is worse. But it seems to work out.

I don't think you need to feel sad for the kids going to school - they have a whole future ahead of them, and although it'll be different to ours, it won't be worse.

Not sure what all the doomsayers are doing on Mumsnet as of course none of them will have brought children into this dreadful world, will they?

And yet this week I read a thread discussing all the designer brands (that would never have crossed our radar back in the day) that are must-haves for 13 year olds.

Poor things, how can they afford their Dior make up when the robots have taken over?

If mine find it hard here, they are welcome to go back on the vineyard. My brother inherited the bigger part but dad left a clause that my children and grandchildren can return and use one of the homes if needed or desired. Thankfully my brother loves me so he won't object to this

Personally I wouldn't. If I had teens now I'd encourage them into a trade,

They’ll be fine, just like every other young generation has been with the difficulties they faced.

Ai does frighten me. I keep seeing those reels of the Ai experts on the Steve Bartlett podcast predicting an unemployment rate of 90 odd percent in the future. I think many of us are now wondering if university is worth it for our kids as by the time the course is over it might already be pointless.

I partially agree with this.

I work for a pure AI company in Cyber. I agree - the fear in this thread and the suggestions around what it will be doing in our lifetime, kids lifetime, won’t happen in the way it’s being discussed I.e rushing in to take jobs and leaving us unemployed.

Even when it becomes more intelligent than us, we are far from having it become emotionally intelligent beyond analysis and number crunching. Working in a consumer > consumer business - businesses are nowhere near as advanced as some think to say “they aren’t getting jobs as AI are replacing them.” No - that isn’t reality.

Companies aren’t mature enough to implement most tooling and the ones who have skill and ability are using it to become more productive and repurposing their high paid resource (people) to do higher value work. Most companies are only just dabbling in the development of internal ChatGPT which is ultra basic, because of the fear of the ingestion sources and the data privacy.

Furthermore, there is considerable law around the utilisation of AI for data and governance reasons, implementing and using it is really not that easy. It will become more challenging (in a positive way) with the introduction of the AI Act etc, especially as legislation continues to evolve. In the U.K./Europe we have far more protection and governance around AI technology than Americans. If they want to do business on a world stage, they have to develop AI products respecting local legislature. As such, UK and EU law is actually paving the way in terms of consumer and people protection.

However we are scraping the surfacing on AI Tooling and all the things we can do. AI tooling if people use it, and I’m not talking basic stuff like ChatGPT - is truly phenomenal. It isn’t stealing people’s roles (for most), it’s enabling them to do things faster, more efficiently and to a deeper degree - but this always needs reviewing. This always needs prompting. It’s only as good as the prompt engineering (instructions from us) on what we want it to do.

Those who will be successful will be those who master the art of how to use AI tooling, not avoid using it.

Push kids to experiment with AI or, yes they will get left behind, but not because it’s stealing their jobs. It will be because someone else is approaching and doing things in a more intelligent way.

I feel positive about jobs in the future, think new jobs will emerge we simply haven’t considered yet. Old jobs won’t be fully redundant, just reimagined.

Do they not have AI in Europe? 😉