Both work hard and take an interest in what we are doing. No one has to answer emails from the boss at 23:00 but they do – because the drive and energy is there to succeed.

I think the biggest issue is those who ‘feel’ stuck. There is not enough help out there to give people oomph and realise they do have a choice.

Govt. initiatives are probably not the way forward to achieve this because the very people who devise these have no concept of what is required to help peole become sole traders, start up a Ltd etc.

Govt. would achieve far more by helping businesses train and employ young people.

This sounds like the start of the Terminator…..

You don’t need a team of navvies, you have a JCB operator and a truck driver. You don’t have a fully staffed assembly line because you have 3 robot arms and a pick-and-place machine, which replaces the young women who used to do that assembly work (selected for nimble fingers) who replaced the engineers who used to do actual soldering of discrete parts.

On the other side, you can take a person who has learned up to degree level, set them a fairly complex task, and after a few hours reading online they can probably cope quite well. For a stunning example, look at the “Faking it” shows, where people are taken and in a week turned into a pro at whatever area was selected.

Of course, at the top end we now have systems that can monitor a thousand or more CCTV cameras at once, which means that ranks of CCTV operators are not needed, because machine vision is now “better” than human. And this is something that is repeated all over. And finally, for those things that no computer can cope with, we have Mechanical Turk which breaks the ranks of people down into faceless rote machines, for a small profit.

Sorry, but it is only going to get worse… We spend ages coming up with machines that can think properly, and yet mock the few people who can already.

In a few more years, even Ph.D holders will be finding it hard to compete with free computer software. A decade after that? You’ll be hard pushed to find a human working for any large business in a technical or other role, unless things change.

So yes, millions will start businesses, but most of those will fold within a year, and that rate will only increase.

People in their fifties and sixties still have energy? I’m 24 and I’ve already run out…

I think the great thing about #genDIY is that it’s very egalitarian – you can be a baby boomer and still be a part of it. It’s all about what you do, not how old you are!