💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~smokey › logs › 2023-07-18-tech-literacy.gmi captured on 2023-07-22 at 16:27:42. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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My parents were born around the 60s. They were fortunate enough to witness some of the most revolutionary technological miracles, and remember living without them. For example, did you know before mircowave popcorn was invented people just took the kernels and put them in brown paper lunch bags and put that in microwaves. Anyways, a story my mom likes to tell me about regarding computers is this:
"When I was a kid they brought in a computer to my school and gathered everyone around to see it. An old terminal style with a keyboard. It probably weighed a hundred pounds. The presenter said "In the future everything will be done with one of these!" And the entire classroom laughed at them, "Yeah right!" we all said in disbelief".
"Yeah right!" Indeed.
Fast forward half a century later and we see that the presenters prediction is scarily accurate. Everyone has a pocket sized computer that has more acess to information than any library and more computational power than ever imagined possible.
Now, I don't blame my parents for being technlologically illiterate. Quite simply their generation has a pretty fair excuse that they weren't born with this technology, they had to adapt to it as adults. To their credit they navigate their smart phones well enough to search things, send messages, and watch youtube. They can even click on desktop icons! Thats a passing grade in my book for the boomer generation.
However, a troubling truth seems to be arising in the modern day. The newer generations are just as technologically illiterate as the older ones. My generation included in that. And we do not have the excuses our forebearers have so something else is going on.
In my opinion, I think the willingness to learn new things is a measure of curiosity, which is a heavy aspect in determining over all intelligence. Average human beings in the modern day have a real issue with not using their brain, and being *proud* of it.
When I was a kid, I asked all sorts of questions. And not in the annoying way that kids do just to get attention. I was genuinely curious about *how* the world worked. I liked to flip over rocks and observe bugs and wonder what the stars in the sky were. I loved books! Especially astronomy photo books, the heavens are made of beautiful jewels. Questions always drew me in, the *hows* and *whys* and if such things truly even exist. Perhaps there is no real why and reality simply is what it is because it can be, but the intellectual search for understanding the heart of reality is so much fun!
This is not the same for other people. Quite frankly, a lot of people simply don't care about hows or whys. They go through life simply not caring, not thinking, just doing without questions, without wonder for the world they live in. Its quite sad once you realize just how empty their mind is of the wonder that all children inherently have for the world when they are born. Somewhere along the way, it was crushed out of their cognition.
Part of being curious is tinkering with things, and computers are nothing if not tinkering machines. Wondering how software actually works, the innards of a computer and how the processor works with the ram and how binary is used to communicate information. How computers talk with eachother, what information even is, and how physical components work with software to create such a thing. These are things only curious people wonder about and spend their free time to try and understand.
So I think the real issue is that people in general are conditioned by the society we live in to crush that curiousity about the world. That if you know too much you are a wierdo, that its cool to be a spoon fed consumer with no real choices beyond brand loyalty. Its much easier for systems of power to control a population of people who do not have the capacity to think freely. Hint hint your education system sucks for a very intentional reason.
It would be easy enough to say "Well average people are just stupid and uninterested or uncomfortable learning new things." And end the post there. While I think that statement has some big grains of truth to it, its not quite fair and a little smug to blame tech illiteracy on a lack of intelligence. Many doctors intimately know the human body in ways I never could, but they cant use a word processor or install an OS to save their life. A lack of knowledge doesn't directly equal stupidity or a lack of curiosity. Its just a pretty good red flag for them. So to be fair, lets get off our high horse and humble ourselves by looking at some cutting edge computer technology.
While consumer electronics have been dumbed down to be idiot proof, cutting edge computational technologies like AI are absurdly complex topics to understand fully without a CS degree and an applied mathematics degree or two. 30 years ago properly programming BASIC and understanding machine assembly code would probably make you an expert (maybe one of you olds can elaborate on that statement). That is childs play today. Neural matricies, computational algorithms, cryptographic blockchains, LoRaWAN radio frequencies, quantum computing, federation, the ever-evolving computer security armsrace. These are just a hand full of topics that modern computing touches on. And let me tell you they are not easy things to fully understand to even a well seasoned nerd let alone the average human being.
To most people chatgpt or stable diffusion is effectively technological black magic that just works, which I imagine is how people also see computers to some extent. And you know what, not even the AI engineers themselves really *know* how AI works, they just train and refine the models and don't even bother to think of the practically infinite complexity present in the neural matricies of these things. Isn't it crazy that reality allows computers to exist at all, let alone perform what is almost literally technological magic not even the smartest of us can fully comprehend.
Mark my words here, in half a century AI will be doing everything for us. Much like how my mom laughed at the thought of computers doing everything, we laugh at the concept of doctor-bots. Watch what happens in 50 years.