Technology

There was a time when I was actually worried about job security due to an overabundance of young people wanting to enter the field. Nowadays, not so much.

On the other hand, I'm instead now worrying that younger generations might become even less able to understand the importance of digital rights if they don't even understand the basics of the technology.

Think back to when we were kids. Remember that period of time when not everyone owned a computer? Or if they owned one, it wasn't necessarily used much? There were people that were "computer people", who used computers daily for entertainment or tinkering or socializing (once the consumer internet took off) and there were people that didn't need or care about them outside of their workstation at the office.

Even after the Internet, this dynamic was there. You had the enthusiasts who really spent time on their computers and got to using them well, and you had people that simply owned them and checked email or browsed the Internet from time to time.

The enthusiast/non-enthusiast dynamic has always existed. There's always a gap. It just takes different shapes.

Now, everyone owns a smartphone and uses for everything. They're critical to life, enthusiast or no. That's the baseline now. The gap is entirely in skill and usage, not so much hardware or time spent on it.

Before computers and the internet, no tech skill was needed to interact with our modern world.

After them, and for a few decades, the skill floor rose. You needed to learn technology to participate in the modern world.

Now technology has reached a point where the skill floor has dropped down to where it was before.

The mistake we made was in thinking that our generation learning to use technology was happening because they wanted to. It was incidental. Skill with technology comes from desire to obtain it, not simply using technology a lot.

Yes, when you were learning those, you had a viewpoint from the outside. That you know there are things like discrete math, electricity, magnetism, transistors, ones and zeroes, etc, and level above level from these things a machine has been built. You wouldn't know how exactly, but you would understand how complex it is and how important it is to approach it with logic.

Now these people don't think. At all. Ads yell with music, pictures and colors at them, computers they use are about poking screens with fingers, and it takes a lot of courage to abandon that context.

Like in that experiment with a white ball being called black and a group of humans where some have been warned to call it black and some start doing it because others do.

Could be, could be. This is just anecdotal on my part where I’ve helped people get up to speed and they’ve told me they basically never used a computer growing up. Maybe they don’t count Chromebooks as part of that group, dunno.

Shit I am a pretty high level electrical engineer, and even I loathe having to use Windows these days. I actually used to be team Microsoft, but have been primarily Linux for more than a decade now, and vastly prefer MacOS as an ssh client, which is mostly what I need a laptop to do.