Editor’s Notice: Google’s 2026 report, created with youth consultancy Livity, explores how teenagers throughout the UK navigate the digital world, from utilizing AI to searching for stability on-line. In a visitor sequence, we invite specialists — starting from youngster security to digital rights — to share what they imagine the report says about the way forward for digital coverage, protecting the whole lot from parental assist to the necessity for higher regulatory guardrails. The views of those specialists don’t essentially replicate these of Google. We’re happy to share their insights.
Too typically, discussions about AI are framed as if the longer term is one thing that can merely occur to the following technology. Know-how corporations will construct it, governments will regulate it and younger individuals will adapt to the implications.
But the conversations we labored with Livity and Google as a part of this venture revealed a distinct perspective. Younger persons are not asking whether or not AI is coming; they understand it already is. The questions they’re asking are extra elementary: how will we select to make use of new applied sciences, and who will get to name the photographs?
All through our occasions, younger individuals spoke with outstanding thoughtfulness about each the alternatives and the dangers that rising applied sciences current. They’re already utilizing AI to study, create and clear up issues, whereas additionally demonstrating a transparent consciousness of the challenges posed by misinformation, manipulated content material and declining belief in on-line info.
In an age the place AI can form public debate, affect political narratives and blur the excellence between reality and fiction, these are usually not merely technological questions. They’re questions on democracy, accountability and belief.
What stood out most was that younger individuals had been searching for a extra formidable response than merely being protected against the longer term. They need to assist form it.
The Future Report displays a technology that’s engaged, knowledgeable and able to contribute. Younger persons are not searching for a seat on the desk as a result of they imagine they’ve all of the solutions. They’re asking to be concerned as a result of they recognise that the choices being made in the present day about AI, digital platforms and data ecosystems could have profound implications for his or her lives within the current and future.
They need to assist reply the questions that can outline the longer term: how these applied sciences must be used, what safeguards ought to exist, and what values ought to information their growth.
For My Life My Say, that is maybe an important lesson from the report. The way forward for AI won’t be decided by expertise alone. It will likely be formed by the alternatives society makes about its design, governance and use. If these decisions are to command public belief and strengthen our democracy, younger individuals can’t be handled merely as finish customers of expertise. They should be recognised as stakeholders within the selections that form it.
This report demonstrates that younger persons are prepared for that duty. The problem now’s whether or not our establishments, policymakers and expertise corporations are ready to contain them in creating the solutions.
