To feel sad watching all these kids going to school

[Artvanderrlay]

and wondering what sort of world they are going to enter when they turn 18 or 22.

I am sure many will excel but I fear a large number will end up financially insecure for most of their life.

When I graduated all those moons ago, I joined a graduate scheme, nothing fancy like investment bank, law or consultancy, it was with a well known high street retailer and I was earning around £23k, but many of my fellow grads were homeowners in their mid 20s, and their financial security is almost exclusively down to purchasing a property when they were so young.

A friend, who joined my scheme 3 years before me, purchased a flat in W12 for £240k in the early 00s. Her father was a postie and her mother worked part time in a supermarket, so the purchase was driven solely by her. She sold the flat this year for £800k, having rented it out for almost 15 years.

She is going to use the money to get her children onto the property ladder as soon as possible.

I was able to purchase my first flat 2.5 years after finishing university. A similar flat recently sold for £500k. There is no way I would have been able to do that now, and it terrifies what is going to happen to all these kids when they try to make their way into the world.

I'm excitedly waiting for the day when a robot vacuum cleaner can recognise a shoe lace and not try to throttle itself with it.

@Penelopepetunia You will inherit that bonus though! The ones whose parents never bought are the ones with less.

I get what you are saying, but I have voted YABU.

My eldest started school yesterday. Rather than dread his future, i am already conscious of trying to prepare and do everything i can to support his future. One of those things is to support financially if needed, as i recognise things are harder than when i was starting out.

It makes me feel less guilty about being a working parent as well. I know anything can happen, but for me, continuing to earn money while my kids are in nursery will be good for everyone in the long run.

I get what you mean about home ownership though. I had awful experiences of private renting, which i believe is partly due to the lack of regulations in this country compared to others. So my aim would be help my kids when they are older with housing costs.

And yet the supermarkets, logistics companies, food producers, bars, hotels, transport providers, recycling and refuse companies etc etc all still struggle to find enough staff.

That's partly because people doing those jobs - largely minimum wage ones - cannot live on those wages in places where the staff are needed.

In part because of that true.

Every generation has its challenges. I try to only think on the bright side. Humans are ingenious, we should be able to work it out. The danger is letting doomism overwhelm you. As long as we’re not dead we can still keep living.

Only if the ropes, harnesses and other equipment are safe and quality checked with an audit trail for each and every component used. AI will probably be ace at dealing with those records!

And what happens when you retire? Pension/ retirement income is typically lower than earned income during your working years, the idea being that you’ve finished bringing up your children and you’ve paid off your mortgage. I wouldn’t want to go into retirement worrying about paying rent.

This is exactly why we are ensuring both of our children will have a home and an income when they become adults. Neither my DH or I will ever receive inheritances, we've built up what we've got through our own hard work and wise financial planning. Even though our children are young, we already teach them about being financially responsible and the importance of savings and investing over needless spending.

The EU will be no better! Some countries will actually be worse off and prospects poorer! So not sure about the smugness that’s coming across!

My boys found out at 13 that they could earn money, that with that money they could spend it how they liked!.
They helped at a function when adult staff failed to turn up and got paid at the end of the night and when I explained to them that is was their money, they earned it, they didn’t need to give it to me and perhaps they could combine it and buy the second Xbox they wanted me to buy, ( I’ll be honest buying the first one took me almost 3 weeks of my own wage).
Even since they have worked, all through school and college, finally leaving school and obtaining full time jobs.
I used to worry about their futures and their lives as adults, but it was unfounded and they are living their lives as they see fit, both doing well, so much so that come our retirement, we decided abroad is so much better than the UK!.
kids can and will thrive, if they work at it!.

@ReadingSoManyThreads We are retired and we did all of that! Labour will find a way to tax it! Our pension savings? Our home if we downsize? Money we’ve saved for dc? Everything worked for. I’m now having sleepless nights about what dc might not get. I feel betrayed really.

But it’s what it is. When I graduated and bought a house, I was paying probably 10 times what my parents paid 30 years previous. Things change over time and the generation of that time adapt as they know nothing different.

Oh I hear you, I'm very concerned at the moment. I hate Labour!! Hoping they're voted out soon.

Do they not have AI in Europe? 😉

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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