The end of civilization has always started with something petty: an archduke, a dead dodo, the invention of oat milk. Today, our valiant UK authorities have cracked the doomsday code: Let a half-baked laptop stare into your soul and guess your age with the accuracy of a hungover fortune teller on a Monday morning. Hoover Dam didn’t burst in a day, and society won’t implode immediately, but friends, let me tell you, it always begins with the machines. In the cold, pragmatic corridors of British bureaucracy, a new divine oracle is unveiled: The All-Seeing RoboFace ID 9000 (name pending, probably trademarked after a bad pub pint). “Show us your bone structure,” they whisper, “and we shall judge thee—old or young, sheep or goat!” Never mind the last time a computer tried to guess my birthday it suggested I fought in the War of the Roses, or that facial age AI thinks my dad's LinkedIn photo is that of an elderly Malamute Dog. This is the Future, and the Future is gloriously inaccurate! Let’s not forget the government report—clutch it, for it’s the last scroll before the apocalypse. Pages dense with findings: the machine occasionally confuses children for seasoned tax accountants. Can’t blame the algorithm; haven’t you ever looked into the eyes of a British ten-year-old during exam week? Ageless, haunted, desperate for tea and escape. Plans are to scan the faces of asylum seekers to divine if they are minors or adults. O, to be alive at the end of empire! If you don’t have a passport, you better hope the facial scan hasn't spent the night binge-watching Peaky Blinders, else you’re getting classified as a 35-year-old steeplejack regardless of your age or height. The stakes are only human dignity, freedom, and whether you room with Paddington Bear or serve in Her Majesty’s Most Adult Prisons™, but who's counting? If you worry that the technology is a bit wonky, relax: the advisory committee of expert scientists was thoughtfully disbanded. Nothing to see here except a faint whiff of burning expertise and the soothing lull of managerial indifference. “Why consult those nerds?” I hear the call from the Home Office, “when you can triple-click on ‘randomize’ instead?” Let’s talk bias! This program gleefully confuses people in ways previously known only to distracted substitute teachers. Whole demographics are destined to become a Kafkaesque spreadsheet error. For some, the machine will guess their age so wrong it might as well be assigning Hogwarts houses. Asylum seekers, welcome to Britain, the land where your fate is decided by a neural network whose greatest achievement is a moderately successful Sudoku app. The trajectory is clear: why stop at borders? Soon the AI will be at Tesco, scanning your face and denying you a meal deal if you look too spry, or ordering you to retire if you look like you own a shed. Queue up, citizens! The clockwork apocalypse beckons. We don’t get flying cars—we get a robot bouncer asking if you’re old enough for the Wetherspoons all-day breakfast. History laughs. The algorithms glitch. We spiral onwards to oblivion, digitized, misclassified, and scanned at checkout. The machines are coming, and they think you’re forty-seven.