I didn't grow up in poverty, but it was always within shouting distance. In 1968, I was the firstborn to young, working-class parents, born into a one-bedroom Glasgow council tenement, where for my first three years I had a bed tucked into a corner of the kitchen. My world was an extended family comprised entirely of manual workers; what we lacked in formal education or social capital, we compensated for with love, encouragement and grit.
For a kid with my statistical life chances, the technology industry lowered a social mobility ladder that I grabbed with both hands. Like many of my generation, ignited by an all-consuming passion for computing, I taught myself to code, to build, to navigate the new digital world that unfurled before me in the 1980s. I would go on to spend more than thirty years putting that fluency and passion to good effect, achieving far more in my career than that tenement kid could have dreamt of.
Therefore, I believe from lived experience, in what technology can do for people. But the hope for technology that was so abundant in the 1980s has given way to uncertainty. And as the parent of a young adult daughter, the concern I hear from other parents about their children's future career prospects in an AI era doesn't feel abstract to me at all.
The ladder
Technology has been one of the most powerful engines of social mobility in history. The democratisation of access to tools, information, and markets has done more for people on the outside than almost any policy intervention of the last fifty years. Working-class kids with access to a low-cost computer at school or in the home could teach themselves to code. A small business owner without capital could reach customers nationally, not just locally. A first-generation student without connections could learn anything.
AI looks set to extend this further, equipping individuals with capabilities that previously required teams, budgets, and credentials. A junior analyst with access to AI has the kind of research and synthesis firepower that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. A sole trader can now produce marketing, legal summaries, financial modelling, and customer communications that once required expensive specialists. That is genuinely exciting, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
But the drawbridge is going up
But a countervailing force is equally real. The people best positioned to benefit from AI are those who already have proximity to it — the educated, the connected, the credentialled. AI literacy, like financial literacy before it, is not evenly distributed. And access to the best tools, the most capable models, and the networks that know how to deploy them is concentrating rather than dispersing.
There is also a structural problem. The knowledge worker roles that technology created over the last thirty years, the ones that served as the new mobility ladder for millions of people without inherited wealth or formal education, are precisely the roles most exposed to the potential of AI displacement. Copywriters, analysts, junior coders, paralegals, researchers. The ladder that technology lowered is at risk of being pulled up by the same hand. Most damaging prospect of all: we may be about to automate entry-level jobs, the very apprenticeship phase that allowed people like me to climb.
Power and value are concentrated in a small number of companies and people, and the governance structures seem thin. And the people making the decisions about AI's direction are, almost without exception, already at the top of the system they are reshaping.
When I speak to other parents, the overwhelming theme is one of profound uncertainty about their children's futures and career prospects. Meanwhile, AI technology leaders casually throw around near-term forecasts of massive job reductions and disruption, with no one grasping the nettle to close the gap between AI's pace of progress and the prospect of a generation of kids about to be left behind. This is the precise opposite of the "BBC Micro" moment: the 1980s UK government initiative that put affordable computers into schools and helped give a generation, including me, its first foothold in the digital economy.
Some will say that AI is the great leveller; that a smartphone gives a kid in a Glasgow scheme the same firepower as a CEO in a London boardroom, but I think that might be a convenient myth. There is a world of difference between being a user of a technology and being a master of it. If we only teach the next generation how to swipe a screen or ask a chatbot a question, we aren't giving them a way out; we're just turning them into high-tech consumers in an economy they have no power to shape. Access to a tool is not the same thing as the agency to change your life with it. Without a real, national effort to teach the under-the-hood fluency I was lucky enough to find in 1984, we are just giving our kids a front-row seat to their own displacement.
What needs to happen
This is not an argument against AI, it's an argument about choices, and right now, the people making those choices are not doing so with sufficient urgency or intent.
Addressing this requires two parallel efforts: building foundational AI literacy into schools for the generation just starting out, and creating genuine pathways for adults already in the workforce to reskill, retrain, and if necessary, reinvent their careers entirely. Both matter, but they are different problems requiring different solutions.
The second track is harder and less comfortable to confront. We are familiar with the idea that there is no longer such a thing as a job for life. If AI's trajectory continues as many predict, that phrase could start to look quite optimistic. What we may actually be facing is no such thing as a career for life. If that's the case, front-loading education into the first two decades of a person's life and expecting it to sustain the next four is a model built for a world that may not exist for much longer. Lifelong learning and adult re-education need to become a fixture of working life, not a safety net for the unlucky.
Governments set the conditions in which either outcome becomes more likely. To be fair, the UK government has recognised the urgency. Its AI Skills Boost programme, launched in January, aims to provide free AI training to every adult in the country, with an ambition to upskill ten million workers by 2030. That is welcome, and it is more than most governments have done. But upskilling today's workforce and building a ladder for tomorrow's generation are two different things. A programme aimed at helping existing workers use AI for drafting text and managing administrative tasks is not the same as ensuring the next generation of working-class kids has the foundational literacy to shape the AI economy, not just survive it.
AI literacy needs to enter the school curriculum as foundational, not optional and taught from primary school upwards, as the equivalent of reading and numeracy for the generation now in class. Broadband and device access are still not universal. The gains from AI productivity need to be returned to the people most exposed to its disruption.
A model for this exists, and we know why it worked. In the late 1970s, the UK was confronting an uncomfortable reality: in business and industry, the silicon chip was transforming the way people worked, threatening jobs and leaving the country dangerously uncompetitive - sound familiar? The government recognised that without deliberate intervention, an entire generation would be left without the skills to participate in — let alone shape — the new economy. In response, in 1981, the UK government worked with the Cambridge-based Acorn Computers and the UK national broadcaster, the BBC, to put over a million BBC Micros into schools across the country, along with extensive TV-based educational programming — a deliberate, state-backed infrastructure for a new kind of opportunity. It was the ladder made policy. What is needed now is the equivalent: a new BBC Micro moment; a national AI literacy initiative, built for the pace and scale of what is coming, and aimed squarely at the people who need it most rather than those already closest to it.
What can we do?
Technology did not give me a ladder by accident. It gave me one because a government, a broadcaster, and a computer company decided that a working-class kid in Glasgow deserved access to the future. That was a question of intent then.
And with the pace things are moving, it is most definitely a question of intent now.