Technology reduces the value of old people
blogs.law.harvard.edu
blogs.law.harvard.edu
The article asks:
"Want help orienting a rooftop television aerial? Changing the vacuum tubes in your TV? Dialing up AOL? Using MS-DOS? Changing the ribbon on an IBM Selectric (height of 1961 technology)? Tuning up a car that lacks electronic engine controls? Doing your taxes without considering the Alternative Minimum Tax and the tens of thousands of pages of rules that have been added since our senior citizen was starting his career? Didn’t think so."
But these are contrived examples. Created specifically to illustrate technology's devaluing effect on the skills of older people.
Consider these questions:
Want help with that Bresenham's algorithm code? No thanks, I use glDrawLine() like most other non idiots. Want me to help you set up a MySQL on that server on the internet? No thanks, I have a buck. I'll spend the first ten cents on an Amazon RDS instance. Then a quarter on buying you a clue. I would give you the remaining change, but there are pan handlers that are probably more deserving.
Also contrived, created specifically to illustrate technology's devaluing effects on the skills of young people.
My point is we don't have to fear monger.
Consider . . . what moron would hire a 25 year old hot shot instead of Werner Vogels. Yeah . . . I don't think that moron exists either. Let's say you have a marketing and design God who happens to be between 20 and 30. Would you match him up against Steve Jobs? No. You wouldn't expect him to be that good for another 20 years.
Talent is where you find it, and it is the only thing of value in a world of rapid technological advance. Talented people have an ability to think differently. People like this will always be valued, young or old. So let's stop 'raging against . . .' and start 'innovating with . . .'
Secondly, I'm surprised so many are taking at face value the value of Googling arbitrary facts. Without some context to put that information in, or to even know what to Google when you face a new problem, Google won't help you much. Ever take an "open book" exam? Did having the book with you do you much good if you didn't also study?
Lastly, an inherit premise of this whole discussion is that the primary value of a human being is his or her contribution to the gross domestic product. Is that really how we want to evaluate people?
I have been declared inept by my household! It only gets worse. You are not judged by your intelligence but by how well you do menial tasks. I have been spiritually castrated. I am a walking corpse. The only freedom is when I write.
Look: Google did not cause your midlife crisis. If you can't live your own life, finding happiness in your own work (whatever it is) and not worry about how other people "judge" you, that is too bad, and you're not the only one (they didn't invent the term "midlife crisis" by accident) but don't blame information technology.
Old people, as a class, probably are valued less than they used to be, but the trend is far bigger and older than Google. Part of it is that there just are a lot more old people around than there used to be. Part of it (as others have said here) is that in a literate society books and recordings can substitute for the old person's job of remembering things -- but that trend is a thousand years old and more. Part of it is the change in family size and migration patterns: Let's face it, other people's kids have always been less likely to honor you than your own kids, and it's hard to be respected by your kids if they lead independent lives many miles away. And a lot of it is just the nature of American culture: The American ideal is someone who is always moving, looking forward, and reinventing themselves. We've always been big on the young: They're the ones with the most future, and it's all about the future!
None of which is causing your midlife crisis either. If you think it's miserable to be a healthy middle-class 50-year-old in the 21st-century USA, you need counseling.[1] Because I'll bet you wouldn't actually trade places with a random 50-year-old in, say, the 17th century: Perhaps you'd be more honored and respected for your venerable wisdom, but you'd also probably be a subsistence farmer, honored mainly to the extent that you managed to have a lot of kids and keep them alive.
Before you complain that nobody listens to you anymore, try and think about the 6.5 billion people in the world who have less voice than you do: Less money, less education, less political power, less opportunity. [2]
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[1] Probably from someone older than you. ;)
[2] Given that we're talking about a friend of Greenspun, 6.5 billion is almost certainly a gross underestimate. Think "the population of the Earth, minus epsilon".
There are lots of unhappy people in the First World. Telling them that they should be happy because of how much worse things could be is the equivalent of telling a child to eat their broccoli because there are starving children in Africa.
I liked your comment enough to upmod it, but this argument struck me as being considerably less insightful than the (excellent) rest.
My writing appears to be a total failure today, not surprisingly. [1] I'm not trying to offer up objective reasons for why one should be happy because I expect them to convince anyone to be happy. Of course that won't work! Happiness doesn't work that way. I'm offering them up as a counterexample to the idea, implicit in the original essay, that one's unhappiness at age 50 is necessarily related to some large-scale objective trend. It isn't. Because, I'd argue, large-scale objective trends suggest that a healthy middle-class American 50-year-old should be on top of the world. And yet many of them are unhappy anyway. I'm sorry about that, but I see no reason to believe it's Google's fault.
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[1] I should note, for the record, that I'm fighting the swine flu, and I'd have a 102-degree fever right now if it weren't for the awesome power of modern drugs. ;)
Yeah. They should read Daniel Gilbert's book _Stumbling on Happiness_.
It's short on hard research, but provides a lot of good generalities, and some excellent starting points for finding the hard research.
Overall, it's a quick, light read and I'd recommend it as such. It's not life-changing, but it's a great little overview of modern research on happiness, and on many kinds of common, widespread irrational behavior, along with an occasional bit of how to avoid succumbing to it.
We've been big on the young since they became the largest demographic. As that shifts, so does the attention. I see far more products and services offered for the AARP crowd than I ever have.
Have we truly forgotten about one of the oldest Aesops? The tortoise beat the rabbit out of sheer, bloody-minded perseverance - and even in an era where one's mental agility and flexibility is heavily hyped, there is still very, very large demand for actual /mastery/.
My thoughts exactly. I've worked with older people who lost the curiosity to keep learning about new developments in their field many years ago, and I've worked with older people who have retained their curiosity. I find in a functioning workplace, the former are often relegated to what is jokingly referred to at my current workplace as "special projects", which is code for "soon to be shown the door", the latter are very highly valued.
Have we really allowed out existences to become so abstracted from the reality of what we need as humans to survive and thrive that we really believe technology is the only sort of skill worth having?
This article smacks of someone raised on MTV and happy meals.
Also:
Give me your average 30-something desk jockey and I'll send him out to work the farm with my 73 year old grandfather who's never spend a day of his life behind a desk. If the desk jockey can keep up, then we can talk.
After all, the article itself pointed out that older people still have stores of wisdom, but where a young person may want to hear about how to make his crops grow better from any source that has that info (especially after your first crop failure), young people in general aren't looking for moral guidance. (Again, until after it has failed them somehow, which tends to take more than one year. They'll learn such things just in time to be ignored by their own children.)
There has been a fairly objective sea change here. It's not just narcissism, in fact I don't think it's narcissism at all.
It's not perception. It's fact.
I say this as someone who in fact spends a lot of time with my grandparents, has spent the last three weekends canning applesauce and visiting my grandparents in the hospital, unlike all of my other several cousins. This is because I am a whacko that actually does value their wisdom, their life stories, and some of the store of "ancient wisdom" like how to preserve your own food and advice on gardening from people who have been doing it for half a century. I've walked the walk here. But this only further strengthens the observation I have that there isn't much else I need to go to them for, compared to what might have been useful 200 years ago.
Their entire value isn't gone, but there are huge swathes of value that are. Bemoaning that fact won't change anything. I mention this because you need to look these facts in the eye if you're going to be able to do anything about it. Waxing rhapsodic about entirely hypothetical values isn't going to change anybody's mind on anything. The only way you're going to care is if you look the situation dead on, see the truth, and react to it.
And many will still choose to not care about moral wisdom or how to preserve food or anything else like that. I disagree with them, but such is life.
Yes, there are huge swaths of knowledge that by certain, subjective metrics won't be useful to certain people, but the same could be said about a lot of things. I don't need to know the same stuff that an architect needs to know for example.
I guess the basic fallacy I take issue with is that people are now measuring the value of a person based on the relevance of the knowledge that person has, and I feel that our value as people goes far beyond that.
Your way of thinking leaves you unable to understand why the 50-year-old in the article feels the way he does. Of course he's valuable, right, and you should tell him to buck up, right? Well, it's true that he's still valuable, but it is also true that he has identified a real problem that you can't solve by just telling him he's valuable. I don't know what the exact solution for this person is, but it's more than just trying to load up on empty self-esteem.
Emotionally fuzzy thinking is a great social signal ("man, shouldn't we just love everybody?"), but it's a terrible way to solve problems like this guy's; indeed, take this tack and you'll just further alienate him. There's a real problem here.
I agree absolutely with what you are saying: there are different definitions of value depending on the arena in question. The issue is that we seem to be taking one area (technology) and equating it with all others, which as you say, isn't useful or valid.
I've enjoyed our discussions :)
Real life example: I'm always in search of good recipes. For sure, there are tons of good recipes out there. But there are even more bad ones out there. In my experience, user rating systems only help to a limited degree. Even then, I'm facing a long web search and I typically have to try many of them out before I arrive at a good one. On the other hand, I collect recipes from grandmothers and grandfathers. They have never failed me. Why? Because they've been practicing them for 50 years.
The downside is that you can't look forward to relaxing and coasting on your accumulated knowledge. You can only look forward to relaxing and coasting on your accumulated wealth.
I agree with Gary. Not only relationships, but emotional maturity, and even more so now than ever HUMILITY… will only be learned with time.
I don’t think the value of old people has declined, as much as our appreciation for them.
Patience: everything from fast food to ATMs to self-checkout at the grocery has made patience nearly unnecessary compared to a hundred years ago.
Wisdom / experience / skepticism / perspective: most of what passes for 'wisdom' is merely knowledge; many such things are right (but mostly can be Googled), and many such things are wrong (because the sample was too limited -- the saw about anecdote vs data applies). In any case, I think it's far more rare to be wise than old. All these seem like they're aspects of the same thing.
Faith: Unless you meant 'trust', I'd say this isn't a net good, anyway. If you did mean 'trust', then I'd say it goes more with youth and innocence than the elderly.
Financial maturity: I grew up poor, and having lots of poor, old people around will disabuse you of the notion that older people are necessarily financially mature; this is more a function of class than age.
Honesty: With pervasive surveillance, we're about to be forced into being more honest than people have ever been. This is actually more likely to affect the young first, rather than the old, as various MySpace and Facebook scandals have already shown. At some point, people will begin acting as though everything they do is on camera. Some of us already are.
Thrift / self-sacrifice: There's less and less need for this, as we're immensely more wealthy than we used to be, and in spite of the gloom and doom about the economy, that's likely to continue without some really massive government intervention.
Perserverance / wit: These seem like personal qualities independent of age, in my experience.
I accidentally downvoted you (while selecting text); sorry. :(
I think this makes the argument for the financial wisdom of the old better than anything else you could say (assuming, of course, you're not "old" yourself).
EDIT: Ok, anyone want to argue that we were not in need of more thrift over the last decade?
"Most of what passes for 'wisdom' is merely knowledge" - Perhaps. But I'd also suggest that many young people wouldn't know wisdom if it bit them on the ass. And no, wisdom can't be "googled".
Faith: No I don't mean trust. And I don't mean religion.
Financial maturity: I'm not saying that old people are "necessarily" anything. But people that have learned to manage their affairs through many decades may have learned something useful. I'm just saying.
Honesty: Personal surveillance? WTF? I'm not talking about stealing candy bars from the corner store. I'm talking about living long enough that you're comfortable being real with the world.
Thrift/self: "There's less and less need for this" Oh really?
Perservance / wit: I do respect and admire the perserverance of someone who's ploughed through four years of graduate school. I have tons of respect for someone who's been on the line for their family/colleagues/whatever for 50 or 60. I find young people often mistake being clever for wit.
Really? We're so wrapped up in technology that my Grandma is now considered useless unless she can help me setup my home media server?
Despite growing up with technology, I learned many, many things from my elders, including work ethic, money management, respect for others and an appreciation for simpler things in life, like gardening and carpentry.
I think I know what he's getting at, but I really just found this article absurd. There is, and will always be, more to life than bits and bytes.
The "outsourced mind" devalued the old. The outsourced body is coming. Wait 'till the young get acquainted with the robots that will devalue them.
These are points where the wisdom of every "old" person becomes apparent--something we seldomly realize before hitting the age where suddenly people start dying, some friends parent, your own grandparents, etc. One cannot find solace in Wikipedia here, and most often these events present life-changing turning points, where one realizes that putting in the extra hours is probably not worth it all, smoking actually kills people, and whatever caused the death of those near to you.
Consequently, the elders the article deals with might not know how to do that stuff or use the internet, i.e., are less tech-savvy. But every single one of them most certainly is more life-savvy, which comes in handy, too.
Yes, sure you can google whatever you may need to know. But is useful to search how to deal with your 12 month baby, for example? You can search about her education, her games, comunication, etc... But all you get is a contradictory mess as a response. Will you get the habit of patience from the web? you'll need it with your daugther.
The same goes with all sort of inherently human issues. You can google about communicating, leading, working with people, but until you incorporate the knowledge you need, you will never be better than a person that has been doing that for 5 years. Google, won't accelerate those 5 years, as it won't sort what material is good for you (wont coach you), won't practice for you either.
So, I'm for giving to the machine (google?), what the machine best does, and for all the other stuff, you need humans. (with experience if possible)
ps: Google, won't launch your startup
The law is an old man's game. When you read an article about the latest case or legislation, the first thing they talk about is what the law was 200 or 300 years ago, and move forward from there. The law doesn't throw out old case-law; it builds on it. In this way, it remains predictable (so parties don't have to go to court to find out what the law is), it retains basic principles (e.g. fairness doesn't change with technology), and it acts as a drag rather than a kite, so it is a moderating force. While the law is often behind the times, that is far, far less dangerous than the alternative.
IOW Judges are old.
My grandfather and I refinished a cabinet and stained it. He had us smoothing out the stain with our bare hands because the brushes left strokes in the stain while telling me original stains where made from ashes and dirt. Hence the name of stains like burnt sienna. I don't know if he was pulling my leg or just talking crazy, but I love that experience much more than a google search. I still laugh about how crazy that day was.
Well let's say "usefulness". What is the value of 60 years of experience? Depends on the experiences, and the context. A woodworker's skills don't age, so long as they're maintained by practice. Programming language (non-algorithmic) skills age exponentially faster. For really complex problems, like human ones, an understanding of the dimensions of life and its complexities is never big enough; thus long experience lends greater perspective.
I've found that whenever I think I know something about someone I don't know, that illusion goes away once I get to know them ... unless their 'life' has consisted of nothing but being 'useful'.
A simple improvement to skyrocketing health care costs would be to eliminate employer provided plans and let everyone buy a plan on the open market.
That's why we should tax younger people to pay for older folks' healthcare. Medicare's 3% is just the start - single payer will let us (I'm older than most of you) bleed them in ways that they'll never figure out. (Heck - they haven't figured out social security.)
Then again, that's not a high bar - they haven't figured out that there are lots of ways to cover pre-existing and catastrophic that don't involve inter-generation subsidies. Throw in some rhetoric and they'll even think that you're doing them a favor.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2009-09-17-young-...
"The incomes of the young and middle-aged — especially men — have fallen off a cliff since 2000, leaving many age groups poorer than they were even in the 1970s, a USA TODAY analysis of new Census data found."
So, looks like the fundamental premise of this post is in error. It is the young who's economic utility is in question right now, if the market is to judge.
Yes, old people may not be tech-savvy but of course there are lots of counter-examples to this and yes technology is not the only thing in life so why take painfully contrived technology based examples ?
Then , there is the whole definition of old , my boss considers me a whipper-snapper , my Boss's son considers me an old guy.
So, what new insight does this blog post bring ?
You have value by virtue of being a human being. If the society you are a part of ever comes to lose sight of that, your very life would become endangered. ("Not considered valuable; make room for the valuable.")
People are not tools. People are not a commodity. People are not means to an end.
a computer != a human brain
logic != emotion
Otherwise, you wouldn't need things like y-combinator, Hacker News, or Startup School. Hell, we wouldn't even need each other. We'd just google everything.
In some sense, it's true: "Technology" has made our old people less valuable. But I don't think it's so much because it has made wisdom less valuable. I think it is more that old age is no longer a strong proxy for wisdom like it was historically.