Beta launch of a new generation

Babies born on the first day of 2025 aren't going to be just the first of the year; they're the first of a new generation.

- SANDEEP GOYAL

The incoming Generation Beta—people born between 2025 and 2039—is the seventh concurrent generation of our times. They're expected to make up 16 percent of the global population, and many of them are expected to live long enough to see the dawn of the 22nd century.

Unlike Gen Z, who witnessed the transition from analogue to digital technology, Gen Beta will grow up in a highly technologically integrated world, significantly altered by the emergence of artificial intelligence. As a result, they are expected to exhibit ultra-high technological fluency. Gen Beta is also being born into a world where trust in traditional institutions that defined not just a generation but entire centuries is waning. So, they may have to set new rules to run their new world.

But does this generational change of gears really matter? From the "Lost Generation" to Screenagers, different generations have defined the course of history over the past 150 years. But what exactly is meant by "generations"? As much as the word "generation" can take on different meanings, in the humanities, it refers to a group of individuals, spanning a range of ages, who have lived in the same period, been shaped by the same events, and—as a result—carry common values and show a similar outlook on the present and their prospects for the future.