Of all the days to discover Gen Z’s misguided affection for dictators…
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Let's hope they never have to find out what it's like...
There is something ironic in the fact that on the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz, the results of a new poll reveal that more than half of Gen Z believe life would be better under a dictatorship, and a third would support a military junta (Metro, Tue).
They obviously have no idea of what life was, and is, like for the billions who had and have first-hand experience of living under such regimes.
Can they possibly be oblivious to the Stalinist purges in the former USSR, Nazi Germany’s murder of six million Jews (and a further five million political opponents, homosexuals and gypsies), the thousands of Spanish murdered by Franco? Or the millions of Cambodians murdered by the Khmer Rouge, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died at the hands of Saddam Hussein, the Ugandans massacred by Idi Amin, the untold dead of North Korea, Pinochet’s Chile and the Argentine military dictatorship.
The results of this poll only serve to reinforce the argument against the lowering of the voting age to 16. Those who dream of living in a dictatorship would soon live – if they survived at all – to regret it. Bob Readman, Sevenoaks
How Gen-Z form their opinions is different generations past
‘We are all living in a land of make believe right now’
Gen Z have lived their entire lives under the influence of the internet, so what this poll tells me is that they are very polarised in their opinions.
I am not suggesting that my own group, Generation X, or others are perfect, but I think we have more of a perspective on life. I would suggest that they, and the rest of us, are all living in a kind of land of make believe right now.
But with the rapid influence of AI, as the old Bachman-Turner Overdrive song goes, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet. Dec, Essex
Those who hope for automation should have some humanity
‘The more jobs you take away, the poorer and unhealthier we become’
Those who wish to defend AI and automation should have the decency to go and share your ‘future-gazing’ notions to the ordinary working classes who lose their livelihood because of big tech.
Talk to the older women who sat behind the tills in the shops to put food on their children’s table, to the young folks who didn’t have money to go to university and loved working as receptionists, to those who were supporting their dreams by working in telephone centres.
And don’t tell us our jobs that you erased were boring – frankly it’s offensive. How unsympathetic and anti-human does one have to be to think companies using human beings for those jobs are ‘inefficient’.
Surely the more jobs you take away from us, the poorer and unhealthier we become – destabilising the economy.
So, don’t empower the big tech and AI bosses. Empower us ordinary people, by creating and protecting our jobs. Emilia Jones, London
And remember, nothing in life is free…
‘If it’s free, you are the product’
As the world rushes to embrace AI, it’s as well to remember a 2023 government White Paper on the issue spoke of risks to human rights and privacy. It added that programmers would insert
their own biases – AI will not
be objective.
And who will be accountable if a member of the public is harmed?
Don’t be too happy that ChatGPT and other rivals are free, either. If it’s free, you are the product. Geoff Moore, Highland