Irvine Welsh


"As someone who understands addiction, Welsh hopes we'll be 'more judicious' about using social media in future. He points to the way people have 'their phones stuck to their face' while they are moving around.

"'If we survive the next 50 years, that's going to look as strange in film as people chain smoking cigarettes did back in the 80s.'

"He also thinks the internet is making us more stupid. 'When you get machines thinking for you, your brain just atrophies.' He fears we're heading towards 'a post-democratic, post-art, post-culture society where we've got artificial intelligence on one side and we've a kind of natural stupidity on the other side, we just become these dumbed-down machines that are taking instructions'."


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