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Comment by wilkystyle | Hacker News Reader

> I think a different genie is out of the bottle that won't go back in: the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention.

Definitely agree with this. Over the past five or so years I have adopted the following approach that ensures have control over 95% of the interruptions:

- I have "silence unknown callers" enabled in iOS

- Focus mode is on 100% of the time.

- I disable notifications for all apps except for Reminders (interruptions I have configured) and the Phone app (calls from people in my contact list).

To your last point, the people I am actually interested in talking to only call if something is too important/time sensitive to do via text, so this works well. Any other callers will leave a voicemail if it's actually important.

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It's lousy for the elderly, who really suffer from this. Many older people spent their lives with a working phone system, don't really use texting, and expect things to work. So our decision to allow the phone system to descend into fraud is really harmful to them. I dread to think what our society will look like by the time I'm really old.

> I dread to think what our society will look like by the time I'm really old.

We strongly recommend you reserve your premium slot at the Soylent Green factory today!

> Many older people spent their lives with a working phone system

It's shocking how quickly the phone system has just up and vanished, replaced by a simulation of a phone system running over the internet, with little wireless supercomputers taking the place of the landline phone's 19th Century technology. Oh, pockets of the old circuit-switched voice network still exist, but they're rapidly being decommissioned.

It didn't hit me until one of my dad's friends called him from an unfamiliar number - because he was forced to get a cell phone for the first time in his life. My parents are on a VoIP service with their old phone number, and it works nicely, but it still depends on working internet - a reversal from when getting TO the internet required working phone service.

The simulation would be fine if we hadn’t abandoned it to scammers so that some two-bit VoIP services could make a buck. The result is understandable to young people: you literally cannot trust any incoming call that isn’t from a person you know very well —- because the only people calling your phone are people who want to do you harm or defraud you. And they call constantly. The worst part is that thanks to AI voice impersonation, even the “accept calls from people you know” heuristic isn’t trustworthy anymore. How do you explain to someone who spent 80 years trusting a communication medium that we’ve decided to let criminals run wild with it, and we think that’s fine?

This doesn’t work if you’re on-call (and don’t have a very specific set of numbers that calls could be received from), run a business, looking for work or awaiting vendor calls.

Now, do I charge my employer when I get a scam call on the work phone while I’m on-call? Technically I should.

Also doesn’t help that callerids get forged to be similar to your own number, which looks like the corporate block of phone numbers we have. Tho I think the networks have someone cut down on the ease of doing that (or at least tagging them as likely fraud).

Maybe it's time to go back to pagers.

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