Although my teaching work is with MBAs, I sometimes give talks to much younger students at London secondary schools, usually about career choices ("how do you know what you're good at?") or personal finances ("what is money?").
I try to approach this age group with an extra dose of openness: not dogmatic, not overly opinionated, and wary of making unwarranted assumptions about what a young person should think.
Nevertheless, a bit of my own attitude to the world usually finds its way in.
"Movement is life" sums up that attitude pretty well. It's an almost-meme that comes from World War Z, a zombie film I cannot recommend because I’ve completely forgotten it, except for that one bit of urgent dialogue. The line is a simple reminder that life involves moving forward, and that deciding to stay put is not less of a decision, and not necessarily less of a risk.
Movement has costs, of course. The chance of ending up somewhere worse, of being reset to beginner status, of feeling like an outsider, of crises of confidence. That’s why I generally prefer to move when I’ve made the most of where I already am. For much of history, however, far fewer people had the luxury of making such cost-benefit calculations in the first place.
If you read the news, you could easily come away with the impression that our civilisation is at a low point. But one reason I think we are, in many ways, living close to a high point is that so many of us have acquired extraordinary freedom to move.
I’m not necessarily talking about social mobility, which tracks where people “end up” and which shows signs of stagnation in the UK in recent years. I mean something more straightforward: the ability to move between places, occupations, institutions, people and ideas.
Much of that expansion has happened within my lifetime. When I went to secondary school, higher education in Britain was only just becoming a mass phenomenon. In 1994, fewer than one person in a hundred worldwide used the internet; today almost three quarters do. Low-cost aviation has made international travel an ordinary part of life for millions. And a form of movement that would once have seemed peculiar – going to work without leaving home – is now routine for more than a quarter of British workers.
None of these freedoms is universal, and not every measure moves in the right direction. Brits today may find it harder to live and work in Europe or the US than we did a decade ago, for example. At the same time, technologies that have enabled movement have also brought new problems, such as compromised privacy, disinformation, and the erosion of sovereignty from careless outsourcing.
On balance though, technology has clearly enlarged the space in which movement is possible, and it continues to do so, which is why I remain an optimist and pragmatist rather than an ideologue when trying to deal with tech-related risks – particularly in relation to AI, which I regard as the biggest leap since the internet itself.
Never have so many people been able to reach so much knowledge, encounter so many different people, travel so far, or move between so many different kinds of work. As a Londoner who became a teenager in the 1990s, I’ve benefited enormously from the growth of this freedom to move. I want other people to have it too — and to recognise, enjoy and defend it when they do.