Reading a recent report from Helena Hollis, Senior Lead Researcher at Ada Lovelace Institute and Victoria Jupp Kina, PhD, Founding Director, Social Research, Remagined, and the Nuffield Foundation on young people’s experiences of growing up in a digital world, I found myself returning repeatedly to a simple observation. The young people interviewed did not speak about digital technologies as though they were something separate from life.
Their accounts moved easily between online and offline experiences, often without drawing a sharp distinction between the two. Friendships, learning, entertainment, creativity, community and identity all unfolded within environments where digital systems were simply present. For many of the young people involved in the research, social media, messaging platforms, search engines and increasingly artificial intelligence appeared less as technologies than as part of the ordinary reality of everyday life.
This may seem self-evident. The first generation to grow up with smartphones and social media was hardly likely to experience them as innovations. Yet the observation stayed with me because it suggests a different way of thinking about technology and its influence on society.
Much of the public debate about technology is shaped by novelty. We discuss what is new, what is changing and what might happen next. We speculate about the consequences of artificial intelligence, argue about the risks of social media and debate the opportunities presented by emerging technologies. These conversations matter. Yet they often focus our attention on the moment a technology arrives rather than on what happens after it becomes established.
History suggests that the deepest effects of a technology are not always visible when it first appears. Railways transformed societies, but their significance became most apparent once they had become part of everyday life. The same is true of electricity, television and the internet. Technologies are most visible when they are new and least visible when they become embedded in the routines, habits and assumptions that shape daily experience.
What interested me most about the report was that it offers a glimpse of that latter stage. The young people interviewed are among the first generation for whom digital systems have always formed part of the environment within which they live. Their accounts describe neither a technological utopia nor a technological dystopia. Instead, they describe the ordinary realities of life in a world where digital systems are woven into everyday experience.
What stayed with me was the ambivalence running through many of those accounts. The young people were often clear-eyed about both the opportunities and the pressures associated with digital life. Their reflections resisted the simple narratives that so often dominate public debate. Technology appeared neither as a force for liberation nor as a source of inevitable decline. Instead, it emerged as something more complicated: an environment that offered connection, creativity and opportunity while also creating new forms of pressure, dependence and uncertainty.
That tension feels significant because it reflects the realities of everyday life more closely than many of the debates that surround technology. Most people do not experience digital systems as wholly positive or wholly negative. They experience them as part of the conditions within which they live, work, learn and build relationships. The young people in the report were no different.
The report also prompted me to think about something broader. Human beings are shaped by the environments within which they live. Families, schools, communities, workplaces and cultures all influence how people learn, form relationships, exercise judgment and make sense of themselves. We tend to think of these as social institutions, yet environments are shaped by more than institutions alone. They are also shaped by the systems through which people communicate, encounter information, spend their time and experience belonging.
This is what makes the report so interesting. The young people interviewed are describing lives lived within environments that previous generations never experienced. Their accounts suggest that digital systems are no longer simply tools people use. They form part of the conditions within which identity is formed, relationships are maintained and ideas about the world take shape.
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in education, work and everyday life, these questions become more pressing. Much of today’s discussion focuses on capability. We ask what these systems can do, how powerful they might become and which professions they may transform. Important though these questions are, they address only part of the picture.
Reading the report, I found myself returning to a question that sits at the centre of Saviesa Think Tank work: what does it mean to be human in a world shaped by artificial intelligence?
That question is often interpreted as a question about technology. For Saviesa, it is fundamentally a question about people. Human beings become who they are within particular environments. The values they develop, the judgments they make, the relationships they form and the sense of meaning they construct are shaped by the conditions within which they live.
The young people whose experiences are reflected in this report are among the first generation to grow up in environments where digital systems form part of those conditions from the outset. Their accounts do not provide answers to the questions that concern us. They do something equally valuable. They offer a glimpse into the realities of life within the environments we are creating.
As artificial intelligence becomes woven ever more deeply into education, work and everyday life, understanding how those environments shape human beings is one of the defining questions of our age.