So now I’m reading ‘Burn Book’, by Kara Fisher. As I was passionate about computers in education back in 1981, this book has great resonance for me. Kara Fisher began as a journalist, intrigued by the young start-ups in Silicon Valley during the flourishing of the Internet. Here is an extract from the first pages of her book:

All these companies began with a gauzy credo to change the world. And they had indeed done that, but in ways they hadn’t imagined at the start, increasingly with troubling consequences from a flood of misinformation to a society becoming isolated and addicted to its gadgets. So had I, so much so that I had taken to joking at the end when I made speeches: “I leave you to your own devices. . . . I mean that; your phone is the best relationship you all have now, the first thing you pick up in the morning and the last thing you touch at night.” It always got a laugh, but by the time Trump was halfway through his term, it was much less funny and it was dead clear that I had underestimated how compromised the tech companies would become. “Facebook, as well as Twitter and Google’s YouTube and the rest, have become the digital arms dealers of the modern age,” I wrote in one of my first columns after I joined the New York Times as a columnist in 2018. “They have mutated human communication, so that connecting people has too often become about pitting them against one another and turbocharged that discord to an unprecedented and damaging volume. They have weaponized the First Amendment. They have weaponized civic discourse. And they have weaponized, most of all, politics.”

From those days in the 1980s when I worked as National Information Officer for the UK’s Microelectronics Education Programme, to now, when all my hopes for the future of our children have been smashed into fragments, I find myself greatly saddened in my final years of life at the present era of tech influence on us today.

We know there are huge positives from developments in technology, but we, the global population, are paying much too high a price.