Kids in our time used to sit in front of computers, nowadays they are glued to their phones and phones have neither printers nor directories... (don't 'well, actually' please)
The problem is that computers could be configured. There were commands and scripts that you could run to fix things. So basically there was something to troubleshoot. You learns how to figure things out.
Phones today have almost no configurations, and there are no scripts or commands to run to fix things that might be broken.
There’s absolutely nothing for kids to learn other than switching it off and on again.
Look at this, for example https://developer.android.com/about/versions/10/behavior-cha...
Why? Let me handle permissions. Don't choose, for me, whether I can chew steak or not.
End of the day, we're trained to be idiots. School teaches us nothing. Products treat us like babies, strengthening idiocy. I mean, if a device breaks, we call the service guy and don't try and repair it ourselves, right? Because "changing a battery is life threatening. It must be outlawed." (- Apple) People are convinced, by ads and media campaigns, that all this is good. People are convinced they are using luxury devices.
They want the PC (a 'smart' 'phone') to get out of their way, and if it doesn't work, they'll just go do something normal people do, like a platonic dinner party or a drinking party.
Hopefully more food pictures & selfies will emerge
We certainly agree that there has been an erosion of computer skills among the younger generation(s) raised on appliance-like computing devices. No argument there. This is a loss. Full stop.
Where we might differ is the question of whether or not this is a good thing in the larger context. The fact that everybody had to become subject matter experts in personal computing just to be effective with a personal computer in the 1980s and 1990s was a byproduct of the fact that personal computing was incredibly buggy and user-unfriendly for multiple decades. If everything in life was as balky as computers were, we'd never get anything done as a freaking human race. How many f'ing hours did we waste as a human race just getting printer drivers to install?
I mean, think about all the hours you spent just getting printers to work and PCs to connect to the internet back in the day. It was rewarding in its own way, and it led to careers for many of us.
Now imagine if everything was like that. Imagine if you couldn't use your car, the HVAC system in your house, or kitchen appliances effectively without hundreds of ours of ad-hoc experience gained through troubleshooting.
For those that want to get their hands dirty, there's Linux and craploads of free development tools even on Mac and Linux. And for those that don't give a crap, computing devices function pretty well as appliances these days.
I don't want to understand it when I just want to like, print out my car insurance card or do some mundane life task
I agree. To put it in somewhat starker terms, it might be your device, but we have rapidly eliminated ownership of the devices. It's not even all the War on General Purpose Computing; there's so many factors here: an expectation that apps/os just work/are simple, need for security sandboxing, and most of all imo the shift of more computing/resources into the cloud. Connected services where the app is a thin-client to far off systems, that's a huge shift away from the ownership model of computing we briefly had.
It's hard for me to imagine what exactly might trigger a resurgence of the Personal Computing model. But computing, for the time being, is no longer ours, no longer humanities; it's heart has effervesced up into the cloud.
Computers were and are an abstracting interface to functionality. Historically the abstraction was frequently leaking and the user had to make various adjustments.
It could be argued the nowadays the leaking has been reduced to an extent that users can fully embrace the abstraction. That is not quite right, counter examples include "after two years of browsing my computer became slow, need a new one" and "I can't use that website, it is full of popup adverts".
My friends’ kids are plenty hacky on their phones. Not in an 80s sense. But in the configurations, with knowing various apps and websites through which to uniquely interact with the world, et cetera.
As many of us have little clue how the hardware works, at the fundamental level, today. I am analogising the hacking we’re being nostalgic about with this higher-level hacking they’re doing today.
It’s still hacking, and it’s incredibly sophisticated. It’s just that the layer that was at the forefront decades prior is no longer today. Someone has to maintain it, but it’s not where most opportunity is.
This is a recent view of mine. But LLMs have set a cap on the relative value of pulling up a terminal.