We Gen Zs long for a world without phones

They ruined thousands of lives. It’s time they paid the price

The first report of the Post Office scandal inquiry was published on Tuesday, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. The takeaway? “The most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history just got wider.” We used to think 900 innocent sub-postmasters were wrongly convicted for shortfalls caused by the shonky Horizon computer system, but it turns out the figure is closer to 1,000. At least 10,000 are eligible for compensation, “and that number is rising”. We were previously told six victims had taken their own lives, but we now know it’s at least 13, with a further 10 attempts. Of the four redress schemes – which have still not compensated many victims – three are run by the government and one, staggeringly, is being overseen by the Post Office itself. It’s like “appointing the wolf as loss adjuster for the three little pigs’ house insurance claims”.

The tally of people charged for ruining this many thousands of lives still stands at “precisely zero”. Millie Castleton was eight when her sub-postmaster father was wrongly accused of theft. She suffered verbal and physical abuse and later became depressed and anorexic; her mother developed epilepsy. One postmistress, who made 256 calls to the helpdesk about the cash shortfalls her Horizon terminal was showing, was sent to prison and denied contact with her daughter on her 18th birthday. “Her daughter died the following year.” Harjinder Butoy spent 14 years in jail, longer than any other victim of the scandal, leaving his wife “homeless and penniless” with their three young children. There are countless more stories like these, and “every single one is a tragedy”. This wasn’t some kind of natural disaster: “there were perpetrators”. It’s high time those perpetrators were made to pay.

At the end of a Cabinet meeting this week, Donald Trump took some time to discuss “perhaps his biggest passion”, says Matt Viser in The Washington Post: his aesthetic changes to the White House. The president began by running through the portraits of his predecessors, from George Washington (“the original”) to Dwight Eisenhower (“a very underrated president”) and James Polk (“sort of a real estate guy”). He told journalists he had swapped out the portrait of Franklin D Roosevelt because the previous one was “terrible… almost like it was done by a child”, talked at length about frames – “I’m a frame person – sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures” – and asked the education secretary whether he should gold leaf the room’s cornicing. He also recalled seeing a “gorgeous” grandfather clock in the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “I said, ‘Marco, I love this clock. Look at it, it’s beautiful.’ I said, ‘I’d love to take that clock out and put it in the Cabinet room.’” And so he did.

Human laziness will save us from the robots

Doom-mongering over artificial intelligence is everywhere, says James Marriott in The Times. Economic collapse and civil war are touted as “near certainties” in the next half-decade. AI 2027, a viral paper laying out the technology’s supposedly imminent advances, has reportedly been read by US Vice President JD Vance. Yet these claims of revolution all overlook an underrated force in human nature: “inertia”. Three decades after the invention of the internet, millions of people still buy print newspapers every day. It was the same with the printing press: illuminated manuscripts were still being produced a century later. Electric lighting took decades to catch on; so, too, countless medical hygiene techniques in the 19th century. The fax machine remains in use in the US Congress to this day.

Human nervousness is a big factor. By some metrics self-driving cars are already safer than human drivers, yet “only a few thousand carefully supervised robocars trundle around select American roads”. An even larger barrier is that change has to work its way through the generations: new tech adopted by younger folk doesn’t become universal until the young replace the old. I’ve hardly touched a banknote in years, yet older acquaintances still carry wads of them. Also, “history is slower than we sometimes think”. The Roman Empire didn’t “collapse” so much as fade and crumble; America’s GDP growth has been strikingly smooth since around 1600, at roughly 2% a year, despite many “extraordinary transformations”. The OpenAI founder Sam Altman recently complained that the technology hadn’t unleashed the social change he’d expected: “I somehow thought society would feel more different.” He won’t be the only one. “Change will come. Just perhaps not all at once.”