I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.
For e.g millennials, we didn’t have internet until our teens, and the early years of the internet looked very different from the ad-infested hellscape that it is today.
Who clicks on the clickbait? Who upvotes the garbage? Who actually sees ads and goes to buy what they didn't need? I think we all know.
The window we saw may have been one of an illusive sub-population who is forever on the treadmill trying to get away from the unwashed masses.
Not everything is Silicon Valley stereotypes trying to feel special.
We don't need the ability to read. We need the ability to convey and understand -- audiobooks can do this, for example.
In like five cities in the USA. I live in a top 10 city by population in the USA (so it's not "flyover"), and the median home price is 288–319, while median HHI is 89. That's easily in the recommended home loan range of 3*HHI.
Look, I'm sorry you can only be happy living in SV, but there's plenty of jobs in the boring parts of America, and the homes are affordable.
All that being said, homeownership is largely a scam, financially. Use your downpayment as a market investment and rent. You'll end up with more money when you retire, and as a bonus, you aren't tied to one geographic location if you lose your job.
The only reason apartments can even exist is because of economies of scale. If you have one rental property, it's virtually impossible to make money (certainly not in a way that outpaces index funds) because you don't have the economies of scale at your disposal.
Homes in the median are generally not viable unless you don't have a family or don't care about quality schools. In my city (90K), two houses that are identical but divided by the school district boundary between rank #1 and rank #265 out of 359 is a difference of $300K. One would be within the median and the other well above.
And let me be clear: ALL HOUSING IS A SCAM FINANCIALLY. Rent screws you one way and housing screws you another.
This isn't controversial. This is what anyone with finance expertise will tell you.
Also, if your down payments on mortgage are equal to rental fees, you won't save much renting, you just have better flexibility with moving, something great for single folks but families want opposite. In our case, for example we pay less mortgage than we would be paying in rental for same place (can check easily since symmetrical apartment next door is rented).
I don't want risky investments with potentially better returns for me, real estate is good enough.
Most people like putting down roots, knowing the town and people, having a local community, would like to have family and friends nearby.
Poor kids.
The real reason you're postponing parenthood is probably that you choose to prioritize your comfort and financial independence at this moment. And there is nothing wrong with it, but I do miss honesty.
Or, in other words, world is fine, will be fine and whatever comes societies will adapt. Don't have kids if you don't want to but llms shouldn't be the deciding factor. Think how late 1930s must have felt apocalyptically in Europe and rest of the world, yet we came through that stronger (and then got weaker but thats another story) and mankind goes on.
Whereas a field 5 miles off a major highway? I bet you could build a city, a better one, for half the cost.
I remember!
Gives me some hope that the kids will be alright.
There is undoubtedly some performative element, how big that is who knows?
This is the kind of stuff which will just cause people to be contrarian and like it because we're told it's something to be embarrassed over. People put human-created content on way too high of a pedestal.
I find it interesting that we have tools which can take a general concept and sound and create hours and hours of content out of that and I don't consider it any different than remixing human stuff, it is still human at its core.
Honestly, for the people who hate this stuff, the best thing you can do is not to mock people in this way because I promise you, that's how you get contrarians. Do you know how rude it is to be told that what you like is legitimately embarrassing? What caused you to say that to another human being? Come on!
Woke up this morning, I was feeling quite weird, Had flies in my beard, my toothpaste was smeared Over my window, they'd written my name, Said so long, we'll see you again ...
Did a vehicle, did a vehicle, did a vehicle come from somewhere out there, just to land in the Andes? Was it round and did it have a motor ...
Music was more interesting once.
Fleetwood Mac, 1975, "hypnotized" comes to mind. As does "Interstellar Overdrive" by Pink Floyd
So yeah. They did.
But what was the name of the song quoted in the comment you responded to?
Wasn't that also a song about UFOs and such and didn't that comment explicitly already acknowledge such songs existed?
If it makes you feel better, it can be rephrased as:
> Most of them are using AI for all their schoolwork while performatively hating it because "nobody likes AI slop" or some other half-understood meme
and how is it "half-understood"? it's simply not the same thing
They don't like slop when they're looking for non-slop and they recognise the slop, because it's not solving their problem. If they don't recognise the slop they'll just treat it as non-slop and use it, and in this case they arguably still liked it.
Maybe breathe and let your brain have some oxygen to think about the answer to your own question.
Wearing your second job uniform while working doesn't reveal a preference for blue jackets, it just means you'd like to not be fired.
As to the difference between voluntary and involuntary, the grey line between those is exactly my point. The employee 'voluntarily' wears blue jackets and could certainly not wear one, and risk getting fired, and certainly could quit that job. A student certainly could spend far more time than their peers on study and end up with a lesser grade on their work, with presumably less returns in most cases. I see a lot of parallels between a teenage student navigating complex new social relationships and learning their way through middle and high school and an employee trying to just earn enough money for rent, in terms of both of them having to make 'choices' that do not feel from the inside like decisions they make freely and that have consequences that appear life-ruining to not take (in which case it reveals a preference for not having your life ruined, rather than for whatever it is that you decided to wear or use or do to merely keep up with the perceived requirements).
using LLMs to learn for example is not the same as enjoying AI slop posters/art etc
hating AI slop overall like seeing it in shirts or something like that is not performative.
like with that logic, everybody loves AI and all the uses of it because they're not being specific enough in their speech
and even if you would hate AI, you don't really have a choice anymore since employers will expect you to be more productive due to it
but I definitely see a bunch of hate towards the dystopian aspects of it and as mentioned before, the whole slop thing and how you see AI slop everywhere now. it definitely evokes a very negative feeling in me when I see something like that
At least kids back then knew how to host their own TeamSpeak server ;) Clicking yourself a Discrd "server" is the easiest thing you can do.
> They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.
You and the GP are talking about totally different things.
Also the OP is talking about elementary schoolers. Even as a future software engineer interested in computers in the pre-smartphone era, my computer knowledge in elementary school was still pretty basic.
Try explaining a clutch and stick shift to kids. They will look at you and wonder why and how you think having a pedal that decouples the engine from the rest of the drivetrain so you can manually operate a gear lever was appropriate for a mass market product.
It did appear to improve for a little while when everyone needed a laptop or desktop to access the Internet. But smartphones have eliminated that. So have tablets. And lightweight laptops like Chromebooks have further eliminated the need for tech knowledge. I work at a K-12 school, and a surprisingly large number of young parents have access to the Internet only through their smartphones. And, truthfully, they don't need a PC to access the Internet anymore. It's an extra cost you can just bypass, and nobody under 30 with kids has spare money at this point.
But, in as much as new teachers coming into our district today are often just as tech-illiterate as those we saw 20 years ago, we haven't seen the number of tech-savvy people really decreasing, either. Tech remains a hobby for some people, and that doesn't seem to be decreasing.
Yes, we're not going to raise another generation where the techies have a common background of making MS-DOS boot disks; reading modem initialization strings; upgrading RAM requiring a chip puller or piggybacking; managing IRQs, memory addresses, or bus addressing for ISA/IDE hardware with jumpers or DIP switches; or knowing what `LOAD"*",8,1` means. But that doesn't mean people aren't learning tech, having fun with it, or making careers out of it.
But will you be hired to do video editing on a tablet? REAL work like for a media company or movie studio? No. ipad skills are mostly irrelevant if your goal is to be employable. The advanced animations and workflows are not being done on tablets. Most people like being employable.
At least kids in the 90s learned how to use a desktop, which directly translated in some way to an office job.
That having been said, the new generation mostly does computing with a smartphone/tablet and these kids are very adept at handling them. If a child wants something, it'll find a way to make it happen and they're good at that. Creating spreadsheets and organizing files is simply not on their list. If it were, they'd be better at it than most people who grew up before computers.
If - and that if is doing some heavy lifting; given the underlying, fundamental problems of LLMs it doesn't make any sense to assume that we'll get there anytime soon - LLM AIs will be able to dominate economy in such a way that humans cannot compete anymore, that simply means that humans will have tons of free time at their hands. ( There's a reason for the grain dole that the Roman elites handed out to the poor of the city. I assume if you have a whole population that doesn't have anything valuable to contribute to the economy, the economy will still have to find a way to sustain them. Otherwise riots.)
A well developed brain seems to be exactly what I would want in such a case.
That hasn't changed for the last 300k years.
My son got caught trying to fix Windows installation on my wife work computer with bootable Linux Mint USB stick.
"Digital Naive," yes, of course.
I'm sure this is some kind of logical fallacy but: show me a kind not on TikTok/Reels/IG/brainrot that has a coherent argument against AI and I'll be interested in listening. Outside that it's all echo chambers on social media IMHO.
The fact you think that not a single one out of hundreds of millions of people has a genuine belief and that they all are just dumb kids being dumb because they're kids and following trends is staggering, I don't think any adult generation has ever had an opinion this extreme about their youth.
Anyway, here's this article[0] that was posted on the NYT about a week ago. It's not about AI, but many of the interviewed kids touch on its future downsides in ways that aren't just "AI bad cuz TikTok". And these kids are young, their worldviews aren't half as coherent as a 16 year old's. They were definitely pre-selected by the editors and probably aren't representative of the average kid, but they represent some of them. That's enough for your request of n=1.
Literally every adult generation has done this for time immemorial, just like the "kids these days" or "the next generation is screwed because X". I'm not saying no kid can have genuine belief nor was I saying that no kid has a coherent anti-AI argument _but_ this article is talking about slang, just because "that's ai" is slang and has negative connotation does not, for one second, mean that kids using that are actually anti-AI. It's slang, not a policy position.
People are reading way too much into that. In 1 year the slang will have moved on and will not be the basis for how they think about AI. Go look at the history of slang, it's not policy forming in the way it's being presented by some in this thread, that's the issue I have.
Just like when kids my age said "that's gay", that didn't mean they were all homophobic, it was slang. Some of those people grew up to be actual homophobes, some grew up to be gay, some grew up to allies. The same will happen here and none if it will be due to the year/months that it existed as slang.
I learned lessons as a teenager on Twitter in 2012 that clearly none of the middle-aged people posting constantly on the company Slack ever internalized.
Our college library is having a surge of requests for new fiction.
I wonder if this is a combination of burnout and good old fashioned rebellion.
Insight into how it effects society? Very possibly, at the least it's a different, more native perspective. Whether it is also broader or more correct, it's hard to say.
They're saying they have a better understanding of the impact of technology, not the specifics of using technology.
There’s still a massive disadvantage if you want a technical role and you think the Internet, Web and Wifi are all the same thing.
Directories and files as computing concepts are ~50 years old while the impact of the printing press is around ~600.
The aspects of computing you deem important may be lost to time within a century, while the "soft subject" of social impact will still be felt.
That’s like being GenX and saying millennials never learned to use a rotary phone.
People are taking your words to the literal meaning and miss the forest for the trees.
Kids aren't conditioned by society and are more in touch with their instinctual drives than adult people. They are much more keen to perceive that a piece of technology isn't "good" or "natural" or "desirable" without being able to form a reasoned argument. Any kid grown on an iPad is able to tell that it's an unnatural environment, and less preferable than growing up among and being cared by other humans.
It's a bit like that IQ curve meme, where the uneducated person (the children in this case) and genius agree that the modern world has gone too far, while the average adult self-indulgently defends our modern world, crying that we should be grateful to technology and if it weren't for it we would be dying of dysentery and we shouldn't resist AI but just learn to embrace it, yadda yadda.
I'd rather trust the instincts of a kid than the rationalizations of many adults, in this case.
In a way I am happy I left so much to the imagination for open interpretation.
I'm more and more convinced that young people (Gen Alpha is <17) have no idea what is good and right for the broader scope than themselves.
Do you really think young people around 14-16 understand the impact of doomscrolling & 15 sec videos on their brain capacities?
To put just one example.
Esp. the ones from the education group are, agains my expectation, very well educated and up-to-date regarding problems of all this stuff. So, yes. For sure, Im in a bubble and I do not know about people & their society outside of my bubble.
Yes, they do. Social media is, ironically, full of young Gen-Z rediscovering the joys of the analog world, saying they want to get off social media, looking into dumb phones. You don't see many "grown adults" talking about it. They're too far gone.
Regarding my two 12-year-old-twins, I have a different perspective and I clearly see that they need guidance, same with their folks in school.
Yes. Smoking and alcohol are less popular with young people than they've ever been. The social pressure and perception of smoking or even drinking as cool and rebellious have mostly vanished.
> I have a different perspective and I clearly see that they need guidance, same with their folks in school.
It depends, no one's saying that the 'aware of societal ills' position is even in the majority, but it is a considerable group, especially with the older ones. I see polarization where one group trends towards full brainrot and the other trends towards full disillusionment. Again, this is not the majority opinion, but it seems at least common enough.