I was reading the news this morning, trying to focus my eyes on the glowing pixels while the coffee maker wheezed in the corner like a dying lung. The headline caught me right between the eyes, somewhere behind the dull throb of a headache earned from a long night of arguing with bartenders about the singularity.
“Generation AI,” it screamed. “Fears of ‘social divide’ unless all children learn computing skills.”
Most of the time, I read these ed-tech fluff pieces and I want to throw the computer out the window, followed closely by myself. Usually, it’s some glossy brochure nonsense about how every toddler needs an iPad so they can prepare for a glorious future of data entry. But this one was different. This one had a kid named Joseph in it.
Joseph is ten years old. He goes to school in Cambridge. And while most adults I know are still trying to figure out how to unmute themselves on a Zoom call, Joseph is training an AI model to tell the difference between a drawing of an apple and a drawing of a smile.
Here is the kicker, and it’s the kind of thing that makes you want to raise a glass to the sheer, unadulterated wisdom of youth: Joseph knows the machine is full of it.
“AI gets lots of things wrong,” the kid said.
He saw the algorithm mistake a piece of fruit for a human face. He didn’t worship the code. He didn’t write a LinkedIn post about how the Fruit-Face Paradigm Shift is going to disrupt the grocery industry. He just looked at it, realized it was stupid, and retrained it.
That ten-year-old has more practical grip on the reality of our digital future than every CEO currently sweating through a turtleneck in a boardroom.
We are standing on the edge of a very steep cliff, looking down into a fog, and the people selling us the parachutes are telling us that gravity is just a “legacy concept” that we don’t need to worry about. The article talks about a warning from Philip Colligan. He runs the Raspberry Pi Foundation. He’s the guy waving the red flag while everyone else is busy trying to figure out how to monetize the cliff.
Colligan says we are heading for a “big split.” A social divide. On one side, you have the high priests of the new religion—the people who understand how the magic trick works, how to pull the rabbit out of the hat, and crucially, how to strangle the rabbit if it starts biting. On the other side, you have the rest of us. The “AI illiterates.” The people who stare at the black box and think it’s God speaking, when really it’s just a statistical model hallucinating a legal precedent.
This isn’t small potatoes. We aren’t talking about who gets to use the fancy filters on Instagram. We are talking about algorithms deciding if you get a mortgage, if you get parole, or if your medical insurance covers that weird pain in your chest or if they just advise you to take two aspirin and die quietly.
The logic is simple: If you don’t know how the machine thinks, you are at the mercy of the machine. And the machine has no mercy. It just has weights and biases, mostly biases programmed by guys who haven’t spoken to a woman who wasn’t paid to be there since 2014.
But of course, the narrative being pushed by the big boys—the ones with the trillion-dollar valuations—is that you don’t need to learn anything. They’re telling us to relax. Put your feet up. Pour yourself a drink.
Let the AI handle it.
Dario Amodei, the head honcho at Anthropic, is out there saying 90% of their coding is automated now. We’ve got political leaders saying learning to code is “old fashion.” They say AI will “blow that future away.”
And then there is “vibe coding.”
I nearly choked on my cigarette when I read that. “Vibe coding.” It’s the phrase of the year for 2025. The idea is that you don’t need to know Python or C++ or even basic logic. You just type in natural language. You tell the computer, “Hey man, make me an app that sells dog pictures to lonely people,” and the AI just… vibes it into existence.
It sounds great, doesn’t it? It sounds like paradise. It sounds like a world where we can all be “idea guys” and nobody has to be the poor sap laying the bricks.
But let me tell you what “vibe coding” really is. It’s the ultimate removal of agency. It’s the landlord telling you that you don’t need a key to your own front door because he’ll be there to open it for you every single time. For a fee. And only if he likes your face.
If you can’t code, if you don’t understand the underlying structure of the system, you aren’t building software. You are asking a favor. You are begging a genie for a wish, and if you’ve read any fairy tales—or lived in the real world for more than twenty minutes—you know that genies are tricky bastards. You ask for a ham sandwich, and you end up with a pig in a tuxedo holding a slice of bread.
This is what Colligan is screaming about. He sees the “leaking message” that kids don’t need computer science anymore. He hears teachers saying, “We can drop this hard stuff now, right? The robot does it.”
And that is dangerous. It is catastrophically, heartbreakingly dangerous.
It’s not because every kid needs to grow up to be a software engineer sitting in a cubicle under fluorescent lights, turning caffeine into error messages. It’s because we are moving into a world where reality itself is being mediated by code.
If you don’t understand the code, you are living in a dream world constructed by someone else. And let me tell you, the people constructing that dream world do not have your best interests at heart. They care about retention metrics, stock prices, and extracting every last drop of attention from your skull until you are nothing but a dried-up husk clicking “Buy Now.”
Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister turned AI investor—a career trajectory that makes about as much sense as a priest becoming a blackjack dealer—says we will move from “staring at the internet to living in the internet.”
Doesn’t that just sound delightful? Living in the internet. I’ve seen the internet. It’s a place where Nazis argue with teenagers about cartoons and where truth goes to die in a sewer of engagement bait. I don’t want to live there. But if I have to live there, I want to know where the emergency exits are. I want to know how the walls are built. I want to know if the floor is solid or if it’s a hologram projected over a pit of spikes.
That’s what literacy is. It’s not just job training. Reading and writing weren’t made universal just so people could fill out tax forms. They were taught so that when the King pasted a decree on the town wall saying he owns your pigs now, you could read it and say, “Hey, wait a minute.”
Code is the new literacy. If you can’t read the code, you can’t read the law.
And the divide is going to be brutal. Colligan nailed it. The rich kids, the ones at the fancy schools with the tuition that costs more than my liver transplant will cost, they’ll still learn this stuff. They’ll be taught how to control the models. They’ll be the wizards.
The poor kids? The kids in the underfunded schools where the computers are running Windows 95 and the ceiling leaks? They’ll be told, “Don’t worry, sweetie. Just use the AI. just vibe with it.”
They will be the users. The used. They will be on the receiving end of the automated decisions. Their resume will be rejected by a bot. Their loan will be denied by a script. Their bail will be set by a random number generator that learned about justice from Reddit threads. And they won’t even know how to ask “Why?” because the language of the answer is foreign to them.
Back to Joseph, the ten-year-old hero of this story.
He was working on a video game. And get this—he didn’t want the AI to write the code for him.
“It might do it differently to what you want,” he said. “It might also do it wrong and you need to know how to solve it… I’d like to be in charge of the AI. If the AI is in charge of us, we wouldn’t really be able to control what we’re doing and that would be bad.”
“That would be bad.” The understatement of the century.
This kid understands the fundamental pleasure and pain of creation. He understands that if you let the machine do the heavy lifting, you lose the muscle. He understands that accuracy matters, that intent matters.
The “vibe coding” crowd wants to sell you a world of mediocrity. An average of all averages. A slurry of content produced by a machine that has never felt the sun on its face or the burning regret of a third whiskey at 2 a.m.
When an AI writes a poem, it’s just rearranging dictionary definitions of sadness. When a human writes a poem, it’s because their heart has been ripped out and stomped on. When an AI writes code, it’s guessing the next token. When a human writes code, they are trying to impose order on chaos.
We are terrified of the “Social Divide,” but the divide is already here. It’s sitting right next to me at the bar. It’s the guy scrolling through TikTok with dead eyes, letting the algorithm feed him dopamine hits like a lab rat pressing a lever.
We have to fight for the right to understand the lever.
The experts say we need a new digital literacy qualification. A GCSE in “How Not To Be A Sucker.” Simon Peyton Jones, a computer researcher, calls the AI a “black box” that looks like magic. He says if you know nothing about the magic, it is “terribly disabling.”
He’s right. We are creating a generation of spectators. People who watch the world happen to them.
I poured myself a drink about halfway through writing this. It seemed necessary. The amber liquid swirled in the glass, a little chaotic system of fluid dynamics that no AI could perfectly predict because my hand shakes a little.
I thought about the future. I thought about a world where nobody knows how anything works anymore. We’ll just be monkeys poking at touchscreens, waiting for the banana pellet, terrified that the black mirror will go dark.
But then I thought about Joseph.
He’s ten. He’s in a classroom in Cambridge. He’s looking at his screen, and he’s seeing the AI lie to him about an apple. And instead of accepting it, instead of shrugging and saying “Well, I guess that’s a face now,” he rolls up his sleeves and fixes the damn thing.
He wants to be in charge.
That’s the spirit we need. We don’t need more “prompt engineers.” We need mechanics. We need people who aren’t afraid to open the hood, get grease on their hands, and look at the engine. We need people who realize that just because a machine speaks with authority, it doesn’t mean it isn’t hallucinating.
If we let the tech giants convince us that learning is obsolete, that struggle is unnecessary, and that the algorithm knows best, then we deserve everything that’s coming to us. We deserve the dystopian housing allocation bots and the automated firing squads.
But if we can teach the kids—and maybe even a few of the adults who aren’t too brain-damaged by social media yet—that the machine is just a tool, a hammer, a screwdriver, and not a god… then maybe we have a chance.
The bottle is empty now. The headache is still there, but it’s a familiar friend.
The sun is coming up, or maybe it’s going down. It’s hard to tell these days. The light looks the same. But I’m going to keep typing, letter by letter, mistakes and all. I’m not going to let the autocomplete finish my sentences. I want to own my errors. I want to own my brilliance, if there is any left in the tank.
And the kicker is, the AI will never understand why that matters. It will never understand why Joseph wants to write his own game. It will never understand the stubborn, stupid, beautiful pride of doing something yourself, even if you do it badly.
Especially if you do it badly. Because at least it’s yours.
Don’t let them take the code away from the kids. It’s the only language left that the future is going to speak. And if you can’t speak the language, you’re just the tourist getting ripped off in the market.
Source: Generation AI: fears of ‘social divide’ unless all children learn computing skills