Idiocracy (2006)

[DDE]

8 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

I wonder how the last 10-ish years of that graph would look if it was made today, with bitcoin and AI "helping" use power.

I don't know. Certain regions known for aggressive mining are also known for flagrant disregard for power grid regulations. You just tap in and mine away.

Where's what @Nuke is asking is fundamentally contradictory.

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

it should also function with ubiquitous hardware so you dont manufacture e-waste that's only good at hashing for a couple years before it too no longer pays for itself

The tall requirements for mining are a built-in mechanism for limiting inflation. Without it, the unsupported currency would get debased pretty quickly, I think.

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

i had kind of hoped crypto would stay. but we cant have peasants making money with little or no effort, can we?

Two fairly untelated factors are causing its gradual death. One, in an age of intense surveillance over finance movements, its basic concept is utterly unwelcome. The crypto industry thus must be reeled in until it's indistinguishable from regular banks... at which point, where is the advantage over CBDCs and various Fast(er) Payment Systems?

Two, I think the memecoins are making the whole thing too ridiculous to consider, to the point where money itself becomes a joke. It's being made from pure speculation, out of thin air...

I feel less ridiculous owning one-millionth of RCC Energia.

[DDE]

8 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

I wonder how the last 10-ish years of that graph would look if it was made today, with bitcoin and AI "helping" use power.

I don't know. Certain regions known for aggressive mining are also known for flagrant disregard for power grid regulations. You just tap in and mine away.

[DDE]

8 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

I wonder how the last 10-ish years of that graph would look if it was made today, with bitcoin and AI "helping" use power.

I don't know. Certain regions known for aggressive mining are also known for flagrant disregard for power grid regulations. You just tap in and mine away.

Where's what @Nuke is asking is fundamentally contradictory.

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

it should also function with ubiquitous hardware so you dont manufacture e-waste that's only good at hashing for a couple years before it too no longer pays for itself

The tall requirements for mining are a built-in mechanism for limiting inflation. Without it, the unsupported currency would get debased pretty quickly, I think.

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

i had kind of hoped crypto would stay. but we cant have peasants making money with little or no effort, can we?

Two fairly untelated factors are causing its gradual death. One, in an age of intense surveillance over finance movements, its basic concept is utterly unwelcome. The crypto industry thus must be reeled in until it's indistinguishable from regular banks... at which point, where is the advantage over CBDCs and various Fast(er) Payment Systems?

Two, I think the memecoins are making the whole thing too ridiculous to consider, to the point where money itself becomes a joke. It's being made from pure speculation, out of thin air...

I feel less ridiculous owning one-millionth of RCC Energia.

[DDE]

8 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

I wonder how the last 10-ish years of that graph would look if it was made today, with bitcoin and AI "helping" use power.

I don't know. Certain regions known for aggressive mining are also known for flagrant disregard for power grid regulations. You just tap in and mine away.

Where's what @Nuke is asking is fundamentally contradictory.

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

it should also function with ubiquitous hardware so you dont manufacture e-waste that's only good at hashing for a couple years before it too no longer pays for itself

The tall requirements for mining are a built-in mechanism for limiting inflation. Without it, the unsupported currency would get debased pretty quickly, I think.

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

i had kind of hoped crypto would stay. but we cant have peasants making money with little or no effort, can we?

Two fairly untelated factors are causing its gradual death. One, in an age of intense surveillance over finance movements, its basic concept is utterly unwelcome. The crypto industry thus must be reeled in until it's indistinguishable from regular banks... at which point, where is the advantage over CBDCs and various Fast(er) Payment Systems?

Two, I think the memecoins are making the whole thing too ridiculous to consider, to the point where money itself becomes a joke. It's being made from pure speculation, out of thin air...

I feel less ridiculous owning one-millionth of RCC Energia.

8 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

I wonder how the last 10-ish years of that graph would look if it was made today, with bitcoin and AI "helping" use power.

I don't know. Certain regions known for aggressive mining are also known for flagrant disregard for power grid regulations. You just tap in and mine away.

Where's what @Nuke is asking is fundamentally contradictory.

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

it should also function with ubiquitous hardware so you dont manufacture e-waste that's only good at hashing for a couple years before it too no longer pays for itself

The tall requirements for mining are a built-in mechanism for limiting inflation. Without it, the unsupported currency would get debased pretty quickly, I think.

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

i had kind of hoped crypto would stay. but we cant have peasants making money with little or no effort, can we?

Two fairly untelated factors are causing its gradual death. One, in an age of intense surveillance over finance movements, its basic concept is utterly unwelcome. The crypto industry thus must be reeled in until it's indistinguishable from regular banks... at which point, where is the advantage over CBDCs and various Fast(er) Payment Systems?

Two, I think the memecoins are making the whole thing too ridiculous to consider, to the point where money itself becomes a joke. It's being made from pure speculation, out of thin air...

I feel less ridiculous owning one-millionth of RCC Energia.

8 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

I wonder how the last 10-ish years of that graph would look if it was made today, with bitcoin and AI "helping" use power.

I don't know. Certain regions known for aggressive mining are also known for flagrant disregard for power grid regulations. You just tap in and mine away.

Where's what @Nuke is asking is fundamentally contradictory.

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

it should also function with ubiquitous hardware so you dont manufacture e-waste that's only good at hashing for a couple years before it too no longer pays for itself

The tall requirements for mining are a built-in mechanism for limiting inflation. Without it, the unsupported currency would get debased pretty quickly, I think.

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

i had kind of hoped crypto would stay. but we cant have peasants making money with little or no effort, can we?

Two fairly untelated factors are causing its gradual death. One, in an age of intense surveillance over finance movements, its basic concept is utterly unwelcome. The crypto industry thus must be reeled in until it's indistinguishable from regular banks... at which point, where is the advantage over CBDCs and various Fast(er) Payment Systems?

Two, I think the memecoins are making the whole thing too ridiculous to consider, to the point where money itself becomes a joke. It's being made from pure speculation, out of thin air...

I feel less ridiculous owning one-millionth of RCC Energia.

[Nuke]

regulation is always a buzzkill. how else is a misanthrope shut-in to make a living?

[Lisias]

15 minutes ago, Nuke said:

regulation is always a buzzkill. how else is a misanthrope shut-in to make a living?

By being a hit-man?

[Nuke]

30 minutes ago, Lisias said:

By being a hit-man?

then i would have to go outside.

[Lisias]

27 minutes ago, Nuke said:

then i would have to go outside.

Let me know if you need some help, my exchange rate favours you by the way! I'm currently pretty cheap!!

(I surely could use the Money so I can buy some new gaming hardware and play KSP2!!!! )

[Nuke]

you are better off buying old hardware and playing ksp1.  just look at the current boondoggle wrt 12vhpwr connectors and the lack of load balancing circuitry on the 50xx series gpus.

Spoiler

 

 

Edited Friday at 09:47 PM by Nuke

[Lisias]

36 minutes ago, Nuke said:

you are better off buying old hardware and playing ksp1.  just look at the current boondoggle wrt 12vhpwr connectors and the lack of load balancing circuitry on the 50xx series gpus.

And, so, half the humanity were saved by hardware failures!

Spoiler

https://www.monkeyuser.com/2020/circle-of-ai-life/

(yeah, I had a hell of a week...)

[Vanamonde]

Please return the discussion to the subject of the thread. 

[Nuke]

8 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

Please return the discussion to the subject of the thread. 

honestly im not sure what it was about, the tangent into dystopian fiction then that fiction becoming reality was kind of disorienting.

[lajoswinkler]

On 2/12/2025 at 7:55 AM, Nuke said:

throw a clockwork orange reference in there too because the way the young generations feel a need to talk in a way that conveys nothing to bracketing generations. even though prior to the grunge era people had been using the same beatnik and surfer slang since the '50s with some '60s hippy speak thrown in. i guess yz,s wanted to be different, even to an x-y sandwicher that listens to metal from the 70s-80s back when everyone else was wearing flannel.  then the phone people seem to be talking in acronyms that have been reused so many times i have to look it up in the urban dictionary. i wont even touch on urban slang the same way i refuse to live in cities. people would rather sound cool (chill is not only the wrong tense, it is very derivative) than communicate effectively.

There is an unprecedented, huge social chasm between generation Z and millenials and it will get even worse with generation α. I am honestly afraid humans will never learn from their mistakes and it might even be a normal (usual) thing for highly intelligent species to crash back to mud after reaching certain level of development.

Millenials are truly digital natives and represent the peak of computer and Internet literacy because they rose to adulthood through developing, accessible-to-all computer technology. Average zoomers, the worse the younger they are, show debilitated behaviour seen with average old senior citizens around computers. It's because no effort is required anymore. Smartphones turned new people dumber.

It is really ironic to see highschool graduates not being able to type, not understanding what a website is, experiencing Internet through a keyhole viewport of their smartphones with applications which tailor their experience online. I watch them and they are mostly inept just like my grandparents were inept.  And it scares me. I always imagined people younger than me will be smarter, more savvy around advanced technology and that I will feel like my parents and grandparents felt when they would see me fiddle with computer cables. Instead, I see a decay being bred for the future and think: "These vaping, hating imbeciles casually abusing synthetic drugs will one day have to take care of me when I'm old and weak." It scares me so much.

When I see generation α with their unprecedented loss of motoric skills, empathy and basic knowledge, I weep for the future of humanity. We will experience a lot of problems. This might seem like "old man yells at cloud", but the changes truly are unprecedented. Our species has never encountered something like this. Sagan's fears are coming true.

[Nuke]

its funny, because i dont use a phone people see me as a tech luddite. even though i grew up at a time when practically nobody had computer knowledge. we pretty much prototyped all the phone features on computers when brick phones were a thing. texting, file sharing, video conferencing. except all on an appliance that was for all intents and purposes tied to a wall. so you left it home when you went out and it didn't interfere as much with ones social development. there was a clear division between tech time and any other time. now its all mushed together and they cant even socialize without a device in the middle.

anyway senior care is such a mess, thats why i take care of my mom, because they would just take her money and shove her into a small room. she is also kind of hard to deal with so they will probibly file her away in a facility that can handle mental disorders, and they would shove her into an even smaller room and give her nothing. how is that different than prison? i dont have anyone to take care of me when im that age, and the soilent green solution to this problem sounds a lot more viable. except instead of flowers i want war footage and instead of light classical i want death metal. in before someone mentions logans run. zardoz may also be relevant as we get closer to breaking the mortality problem.

Edited Saturday at 08:11 PM by Nuke

[lajoswinkler]

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

its funny, because i dont use a phone people see me as a tech luddite. even though i grew up at a time when practically nobody had computer knowledge. we pretty much prototyped all the phone features on computers when brick phones were a thing. texting, file sharing, video conferencing. except all on an appliance that was for all intents and purposes tied to a wall. so you left it home when you went out and it didn't interfere as much with ones social development. there was a clear division between tech time and any other time. now its all mushed together and they cant even socialize without a device in the middle.

anyway senior care is such a mess, thats why i take care of my mom, because they would just take her money and shove her into a small room. she is also kind of hard to deal with so they will probibly file her away in a facility that can handle mental disorders, and they would shove her into an even smaller room and give her nothing. how is that different than prison? i dont have anyone to take care of me when im that age, and the soilent green solution to this problem sounds a lot more viable. except instead of flowers i want war footage and instead of light classical i want death metal. in before someone mentions logans run. zardoz may also be relevant as we get closer to breaking the mortality problem.

Oh yes, that. I did video conferencing over ICQ over two decades ago, used live geolocation on maps over cellphones with graphical interface, understand a great deal about digital devices, but because I refuse to put my personal life out there for trolls and AI to do data mining, I'm a luddite. And these are the thoughts of kids who refuse to believe their lives, their anthropometric data, ways of moving are nothing but a product. Thoughts of kids who don't know what a file extension is or what a byte is. It's going to get so much worse when they start to accept mushing of AI into every pore of their lives.

And the disinformation in this rising posttruth society... omg. More and more I have to explain to them that it's a bad thing. It's like living in an increasingly kafkian world.

[SunlitZelkova]

4 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

This might seem like "old man yells at cloud", but the changes truly are unprecedented. Our species has never encountered something like this. Sagan's fears are coming true.

I mean, it kinda does really seem that way. If I switched out the words and names of the generations this might as well have been boomers talking about millennials.

4 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

There is an unprecedented, huge social chasm between generation Z and millenials and it will get even worse with generation α. I am honestly afraid humans will never learn from their mistakes and it might even be a normal (usual) thing for highly intelligent species to crash back to mud after reaching certain level of development.

Millenials are truly digital natives and represent the peak of computer and Internet literacy because they rose to adulthood through developing, accessible-to-all computer technology. Average zoomers, the worse the younger they are, show debilitated behaviour seen with average old senior citizens around computers. It's because no effort is required anymore. Smartphones turned new people dumber.

It is really ironic to see highschool graduates not being able to type, not understanding what a website is, experiencing Internet through a keyhole viewport of their smartphones with applications which tailor their experience online. I watch them and they are mostly inept just like my grandparents were inept.  And it scares me. I always imagined people younger than me will be smarter, more savvy around advanced technology and that I will feel like my parents and grandparents felt when they would see me fiddle with computer cables. Instead, I see a decay being bred for the future and think: "These vaping, hating imbeciles casually abusing synthetic drugs will one day have to take care of me when I'm old and weak." It scares me so much.

Where are these Gen-Z people you’re encountering? And just to be clear, we’re talking about the same Gen-Z, right?

Gen-Z is anyone born between 1997-2010 (sometimes 1996). I’ve seen older individuals thinking that Gen-Z is just a byword for teenagers, and that’s not the case.

Also, what exactly is the problem here? Apart from “not knowing what a website is” none of what you mention seems to be that big of a deal. And even then, I highly question whether millenials are truly that savvy. About the only people who might remember what a website is are people who go on to become actual web designers or enthusiasts.

I was taking Intro to ICT at a university in the Fall. Even as a guy born in 2001 surrounded mostly by people born in 2006, people were averaging 40-50 words per minute despite not knowing how to type. I myself do not know how to type, and I was in that range too. Sure, typing is useful… the one kid who did know how to was getting like 80 words per minute, IIRC… but I don’t think it’s the end all be all. We’re not decoding the 14-part Message here.

“Experiencing Internet through a keyhole viewport in their smartphones with applications which tailor their experience online.” What does this even mean? Did millenials “experience information through a keyhole viewport in their PCs with programs which tailor their access to it” instead of living in the glorious world of filing cabinets and typewriters?

Responding to a couple more specific points…

4 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

I am honestly afraid humans will never learn from their mistakes and it might even be a normal (usual) thing for highly intelligent species to crash back to mud after reaching certain level of development.

What mistakes are you talking about? If smartphones are the problem, one mistake becomes the Internet, which made iterating basic mobile phones into smartphones a viable investment. In which case the opportunity there was to learn from this mistake would have to come from watching millenials use the Internet… but you claim that was a good thing.

4 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

I watch them and they are mostly inept just like my grandparents were inept.  And it scares me. I always imagined people younger than me will be smarter, more savvy around advanced technology and that I will feel like my parents and grandparents felt when they would see me fiddle with computer cables. Instead, I see a decay being bred for the future and think: "These vaping, hating imbeciles casually abusing synthetic drugs will one day have to take care of me when I'm old and weak." It scares me so much.

This is literally basic “old man yells at cloud” dialogue. I’d like to note that equally drug-interested millenials are now working at retirement homes and taking care of boomers just fine (in the US). In Japan it’s the same case, and there’s a whole market for innovations in senior care because of the growing elderly population. I think you’ll be fine.

4 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

When I see generation α with their unprecedented loss of motoric skills, empathy and basic knowledge, I weep for the future of humanity. We will experience a lot of problems. This might seem like "old man yells at cloud", but the changes truly are unprecedented. Our species has never encountered something like this. Sagan's fears are coming true.

The state of generation Alpha is wildly overblown by click-bait YouTubers and memes. At worst, wanting the tablet all the time has replaced wanting the toy all the time.

It should be noted the preteens, children, and toddlers are not at fault for how they are: it would be the parents’ fault. And mind you, Gen Alpha was birthed, and is being raised, mostly by millenials. If there does end up being some sort of society-wide malaise in the future, your generation (and mine) will have no one to blame but ourselves.

I’d also like to note that the kind of policing of behavior and strict education that would be required to prevent people from “making mistakes” and “retaining empathy and basic knowledge” is probably not a recipe for a societal Golden Age. The closest thing to what you and other advocates for a stricter, “proper” society want is Japan. Japan still has the same social norms, manners, and so forth it has had since the 1960s, all in the name of upholding Japan’s “enlightened state” and “correct way of living.”

Its economy has not only been in stagnation for over 30 years, it is a shell of its former self when it comes to technology and is currently facing a looming demographic crisis similar to the one that helped kill the Soviet Union. I’d go as far as to say that it is because enthusiasts who “know what a website is” grew up, and continue to grow up, to enter the IT sector that Japan’s government websites look like they are from 1999 and despite finally ridding itself of floppy disks, the government still uses fax.

And all that uniformity and properness generates just the same kind of attitude you have about much more free societies but in reverse, towards the strict one. I chatted with a girl three years younger than me at the university one night and she said the prevailing attitude among Gen-Z in Japan is that the country is “over” and that China and the Global South are where real opportunities lie.

(To any fans of Japanese sociology, yes, she said China. This aligns with surveys indicating younger people tend to have a neutral or even positive view of China, with only older generations having mostly negative views of it. And yes, young people are indeed fleeing Japan in large numbers every year and this is part of what is contributing to demographic decline, together with the low birth rate)

[AlamoVampire]

4 hours ago, Nuke said:

the mortality problem.

Immortality right now is a bad bad BAD idea. Our survival as a species requires death. And given our current trajectory only the hyper rich and hyper corrupt would “benefit” sending us into an even worse hellscape than the current hellscape we are in. 185702152025

[Nuke]

6 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

Immortality right now is a bad bad BAD idea. Our survival as a species requires death. And given our current trajectory only the hyper rich and hyper corrupt would “benefit” sending us into an even worse hellscape than the current hellscape we are in. 185702152025

zardoz was a warning. if you want to live forever you have to give up something. the movie spelled it out in a rather vulgar way, it was the '70s after all. but you cant have immortality without creating a population crisis, so its either for the few or you have to stop reproducing, perhaps as a condition of having the procedure done. whatever method is used, it probibly wont protect you in case of rapid unplanned disassembly of the biological sort, unless its a mind upload. but even that will come with an energy cost, and thanks to entropy, a source of potential conflict resulting in violence or some kind of emp attack on the datacenter (this would actually make a good sci-if scenario where a lot of digital minds are scrambled in such an attack, but some survive and are still conscious, and whatever container structure they are stored in break down so you end up with what is essentially a mad hive mind intelligence hellbent on destruction).

i like to think of life as an iterative process. new people are new perspectives and death cleanses the way. but without that you all become "old man yelling at cloud" even though you look no older than 20. the thinking becomes so inflexible and life loses its meaning. you just exist to spite the universe, god, or what have you. kosh was right, we are not ready for immortality.

[AlamoVampire]

Another perspective on how messed up it could be is the movie In Time (was released in 2011 with justin timberlake). The hyper rich live in decadence and excess in a meaningless hedonistic mockery of life while the poor and downtrodden live in abject poverty and hell. Reality is quickly becoming if you dont have 10 figure minimum bank accounts you are trash. The rich get richer whilst the rest of us just get dead. 015002162025

[DDE]

23 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

There is an unprecedented, huge social chasm between generation Z and millenials and it will get even worse with generation α. I am honestly afraid humans will never learn from their mistakes and it might even be a normal (usual) thing for highly intelligent species to crash back to mud after reaching certain level of development.

Millenials are truly digital natives and represent the peak of computer and Internet literacy because they rose to adulthood through developing, accessible-to-all computer technology. Average zoomers, the worse the younger they are, show debilitated behaviour seen with average old senior citizens around computers. It's because no effort is required anymore. Smartphones turned new people dumber.

b. 1993, already working alongside a sufficiently large sample of freshly graduated Gen Z'ers, and they are fine. Yes, one of them complains he can't resist the gravitational pull of his gaming laptop when working remotely, another one wore her Slytherin pin to the office a rather stodgy client... and yet another one went through ROTC as a BM-21 Grad gunner last summer.

It's not a chasm, they aren't any less bright, and the mythical PC illiteracy isn't there...

[Nuke]

every generation has its nerds. though for every kid who knows how to program a phone, there are probibly 30 that dont even know they are using a computer.

[SunlitZelkova]

4 hours ago, Nuke said:

every generation has its nerds. though for every kid who knows how to program a phone, there are probibly 30 that dont even know they are using a computer.

That's kind of a problem with how ubiquitous computers are. Is an M1 Abrams gunner "training the gun" or "using a computer?"

When my grandparents make coffee with their Keurig, are they preparing coffee or "using a computer?"

Because computers are tools, people just tend not to care how they work. Just think of the number of people who don't know how their car's combustion engine works, compared to the number of car geeks out there.

[Superfluous J]

3 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

When my grandparents make coffee with their Keurig, are they preparing coffee or "using a computer?"

Neither

Ba dum, ching. I'm here all week.

[Nuke]

coffee is still a thing that confounds me. people say thats a good cup of coffee, or that its a bad cup of coffee, an i couldn't tell the difference, they both taste bad. and there is that other subset of coffee drinkers who go in for coffee and come out with dessert. my mom loads here coffee with enough flavored creme and sugar to make it almost drinkable, almost. its like downing a cup of syrup.

[lajoswinkler]

21 hours ago, DDE said:

b. 1993, already working alongside a sufficiently large sample of freshly graduated Gen Z'ers, and they are fine. Yes, one of them complains he can't resist the gravitational pull of his gaming laptop when working remotely, another one wore her Slytherin pin to the office a rather stodgy client... and yet another one went through ROTC as a BM-21 Grad gunner last summer.

It's not a chasm, they aren't any less bright, and the mythical PC illiteracy isn't there...

They are defined as humans who don't remember the world before broadband Internet. There is a chasm because broadband Internet has turned the world upside down. It tore down the distinction between offline and online world. This is a huge thing compared to introduction of television. We are talking about children who were raised with machines which could deliver them any information they wanted, nearly instantly. Before that, decades of generations were, if left alone in front of TV, exposed to at least somewhat curated content. Zoomers were raised in environment exposing them to the most horrific things imaginable. When did we ever have whole generations involved in sharing videos of brutal murders and violent, sickest forms of pornography? When did we have generations of children in constant danger of getting their life ruined by online abuse on social networks? They say the wrong thing, they wear something wrong? Before you had classmates laughing at them, now you have danger of becoming the laughing stock of the planet. I do not envy them. It's an insane amount of stress and peer pressure that has led them into unprecedented conformity.

Mythical PC illiteracy? Oh, you clearly work with talented ones.

On 2/16/2025 at 12:40 AM, SunlitZelkova said:

I mean, it kinda does really seem that way. If I switched out the words and names of the generations this might as well have been boomers talking about millennials.

Where are these Gen-Z people you’re encountering? And just to be clear, we’re talking about the same Gen-Z, right?

Gen-Z is anyone born between 1997-2010 (sometimes 1996). I’ve seen older individuals thinking that Gen-Z is just a byword for teenagers, and that’s not the case.

Also, what exactly is the problem here? Apart from “not knowing what a website is” none of what you mention seems to be that big of a deal. And even then, I highly question whether millenials are truly that savvy. About the only people who might remember what a website is are people who go on to become actual web designers or enthusiasts.

I was taking Intro to ICT at a university in the Fall. Even as a guy born in 2001 surrounded mostly by people born in 2006, people were averaging 40-50 words per minute despite not knowing how to type. I myself do not know how to type, and I was in that range too. Sure, typing is useful… the one kid who did know how to was getting like 80 words per minute, IIRC… but I don’t think it’s the end all be all. We’re not decoding the 14-part Message here.

“Experiencing Internet through a keyhole viewport in their smartphones with applications which tailor their experience online.” What does this even mean? Did millenials “experience information through a keyhole viewport in their PCs with programs which tailor their access to it” instead of living in the glorious world of filing cabinets and typewriters?

Responding to a couple more specific points…

What mistakes are you talking about? If smartphones are the problem, one mistake becomes the Internet, which made iterating basic mobile phones into smartphones a viable investment. In which case the opportunity there was to learn from this mistake would have to come from watching millenials use the Internet… but you claim that was a good thing.

This is literally basic “old man yells at cloud” dialogue. I’d like to note that equally drug-interested millenials are now working at retirement homes and taking care of boomers just fine (in the US). In Japan it’s the same case, and there’s a whole market for innovations in senior care because of the growing elderly population. I think you’ll be fine.

The state of generation Alpha is wildly overblown by click-bait YouTubers and memes. At worst, wanting the tablet all the time has replaced wanting the toy all the time.

It should be noted the preteens, children, and toddlers are not at fault for how they are: it would be the parents’ fault. And mind you, Gen Alpha was birthed, and is being raised, mostly by millenials. If there does end up being some sort of society-wide malaise in the future, your generation (and mine) will have no one to blame but ourselves.

I’d also like to note that the kind of policing of behavior and strict education that would be required to prevent people from “making mistakes” and “retaining empathy and basic knowledge” is probably not a recipe for a societal Golden Age. The closest thing to what you and other advocates for a stricter, “proper” society want is Japan. Japan still has the same social norms, manners, and so forth it has had since the 1960s, all in the name of upholding Japan’s “enlightened state” and “correct way of living.”

Its economy has not only been in stagnation for over 30 years, it is a shell of its former self when it comes to technology and is currently facing a looming demographic crisis similar to the one that helped kill the Soviet Union. I’d go as far as to say that it is because enthusiasts who “know what a website is” grew up, and continue to grow up, to enter the IT sector that Japan’s government websites look like they are from 1999 and despite finally ridding itself of floppy disks, the government still uses fax.

And all that uniformity and properness generates just the same kind of attitude you have about much more free societies but in reverse, towards the strict one. I chatted with a girl three years younger than me at the university one night and she said the prevailing attitude among Gen-Z in Japan is that the country is “over” and that China and the Global South are where real opportunities lie.

(To any fans of Japanese sociology, yes, she said China. This aligns with surveys indicating younger people tend to have a neutral or even positive view of China, with only older generations having mostly negative views of it. And yes, young people are indeed fleeing Japan in large numbers every year and this is part of what is contributing to demographic decline, together with the low birth rate)

Teachers from all over the world are noticing a decline in students' attention span, empathy and motoric skills. This is not made up stuff. This already started to be noticed in the 90s, but grew to serious proportions in the next decades.

The generation X are parents of younger generation Y and Z. Millenials (generation Y) are making a much worse thing with alphas. And why did this happen? I don't know, but it is a recognized problem. I've got friends who work in education in EU and they are experiencing increasing work related stress because of how violent and entitled children are rising in numbers. Some have even quit jobs they loved and thought were their calling. Same story around EU countries, same story in USA, Canada, ...

Computer literacy is VITAL in today's world. I am not going to defend this statement. It is basically axiomatic. Current state of affairs is already creating problems at workplaces and it's just laughable. I repeat, these are averages. I am not generalizing. Behaviours and properties of average people have changed for the worse.

Regarding drugs, drug problem is not the same as before. For many generations we had drunkards as a fairly constant variable. Things have changed. Cannabis used to be a rebelious thing. Huge amounts of alcohol and ethanol poisoning have been a norm for quite some time, they are not even seen as rebelious anymore. What cannabis used to be, now are cocaine and synthetic drugs. For the past decade or so, serious hard drugs which have viciously bad consequences on neuroplastic brains became a normal party property. Proof? One of the most horrific proofs are increasing concentrations of cocaine's, metamphetamine's and metabolites of other hard drugs in sewage waters of average towns/cities. We can't hide urine and feces and they speak a story of increasingly poisoned population.

Things are changing. This practice is not sustainable because we will have so many problems with psychotic individuals in the future. What will this do to the public health? What will it do to democracies which depend on the majority being sufficiently rational?