Model answer
Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
Q: Has technology made people less patient?
A: I'd say yes, though "impatient" might not be quite the right word — it's more that our tolerance for waiting has been recalibrated by things that used to be slow becoming instant. Once you're used to a page loading in under a second, three seconds actually starts to feel broken, even though objectively it's nothing. I notice it in myself with things that have nothing to do with technology too — queuing, slow conversations — so I think the effect spreads beyond screens into general expectations. The counterargument is that some of this "impatience" is really just efficiency; we've simply stopped tolerating unnecessary delay, which isn't obviously a bad thing. So I'd call it a shift in standards rather than a decline in character.
Q: Who should be responsible for online safety?
A: I think it has to be shared, because no single party is positioned to handle the whole problem. Platforms clearly have a responsibility given that they design the systems and can see patterns no individual user can, but relying on them entirely assumes their incentives line up with user safety, which they often don't. Parents and schools have a role too, particularly with younger users, though that only works if the adults themselves understand the platforms well enough to guide anyone. My honest view is that regulation ends up being the piece that forces the other two to actually follow through, rather than any one group solving it voluntarily.
Q: Will artificial intelligence create or destroy jobs?
A: Both, almost certainly, and I think the more useful question is which jobs and on what timeline rather than a simple yes or no. Some roles will genuinely disappear, particularly ones built around repetitive, predictable tasks, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone prepare. But new categories of work tend to appear alongside major technological shifts — that's been true of most previous ones — even if it's hard to picture exactly what they'll look like in advance. What worries me more than the net number is the transition itself, since the people who lose jobs are rarely the same people who gain the new ones.
Q: Should governments regulate artificial intelligence more strictly?
A: I lean toward yes, but I'm wary of regulation that's written by people who don't fully understand what they're regulating, which is a real risk given how fast the technology moves. Some oversight is clearly necessary — left entirely to market incentives, safety tends to come second to speed. At the same time, overly rigid rules can freeze in place assumptions that stop being true within a couple of years, so the regulation needs to be adaptable rather than fixed. I think the goal should be accountability for outcomes rather than control over the technical details.
Q: Do you think people trust technology companies too much?
A: In some ways, yes — people hand over a striking amount of personal information for the sake of convenience without really weighing the trade-off. I think that's less about blind trust and more about the cost of scrutinising every service being too high for most people to bother, so trust becomes the default by exhaustion rather than genuine confidence. That said, I don't think it's entirely misplaced; most companies have some incentive to avoid the kind of scandal that damages their reputation. The bigger issue is probably that trust and understanding aren't the same thing, and a lot of people trust systems they don't actually understand.