A hurried post today. Sort of ties in with yesterday’s. Sort of.
Random thoughts on change and on technological change specifically:
As we get older we lose our taste for rapid change, even those of us who were always at the edge of it (and my husband and I were both early compute and early internet adopters.) I note a change in me as I contemplate these trips on business. I don’t want to travel, partly because t takes time from my novels, but also because it breaks my routine. And I like my routine. I like my bed. I like my neighborhood, I like my office-ish. I know this makes me sound old and peevish, but there it is.
On the other hand, I’m not that old, and our society is aging faster than I am, since boomers are the largest component of it and they’re getting older.
Is it my impression, or is it a really bad circumstance to have a large component of elderly people in a society experiencing fast, catastrophic technological change?
In former times, people often lost their profession to change, but that was okay, as they lived much shorter lives than we do.
On the other hand, would you trade your longer life for a more stable world? I wouldn’t.
Will a more aged population slow the change, as we cling stubornely to “the way things used to be”? Would publishers be reacting this badly if the median age of management weren’t older than I? What is the ideal balance between flexibility and life experience? Is the fact that Europeans are, as a population, older than us a factor in how they’ll react to the economic crisis?
I don’t have any answers. Each of those questions could lead to a speculative essay, but not while I still need to kick the cat out of my suitcase – again – and finish packing. I might pursue these the rest of the week. For now, I’d like to hear your thoughts and your further questions about how much of our sense of crisis is the fatal intersection of national aging and technological change.
According To Hoyt 
No answers here.
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What will happen is that an entire industry will spring up to cater to an elderly population that has money and doesn’t like change. Nostalgia will become big business.
And no, I don’t like change either. I had to make a wrenching change back in my 40s, managed it well enough by re-inventing myself, but now I just don’t have the brains (or the ability to retain new information) to do it again.
And I hate strange beds.
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I have a picture on my wall of my great grandfather, Ole Lasson, first generation swede, right off the boat. He is surrounded by his wife and eight children. Six more would be born. Seven of them total would die before reaching adulthood.
The combined infant and childhood mortality rates claimed nearly half of the children ever born before the year 1930. My grandmother’s generation was the first generation where on average, a mother could expect to outlive most of her children. That was the first time in human history this had ever happened.
If we have ever crossed a singularity, that was it. Since then, as every nation has developed, birth rates have dropped dramatically. The focus has shifted from producing the next generation to fulfilling our own lives, which are very long indeed, and only getting longer.
Computers and machines are just faster, better ways to do the things we have always done. Once you build a Stonehenge, the iPad is inevitable, but changing the human family from a structure that was focused on producing the next generation, to one focused on fulfilling the life of the individual? That’s the real change.
Where will this head? I don’t know. Maybe we will all evolve into immortal artist/philosopher cyborgs that don’t need to reproduce. Or maybe we will be like pandas, who can’t be bothered to screw enough to keep themselves from extinction.
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I think the sense of crisis is basically personal, not a reasoned look at older people being slow to adopt tech.
Okay, so I’m older than most people here, but my 85 year old Mother calls me for help with anything computerish that goes wrong. And I was dragged reluctently into the PC age. I took some evening classes at the local community college in word processing and “DOS.” Then later in this rediculosly named “Windows” thing. And gritted my teeth and determinedly set out to check out this “internet” thing my children insisted they had to have for school research. Pretty funny, in retrospect. An hour in and I was _so_ hooked. Because all I could think to want to find out was when the next LM Bujold book was coming out, and a few links took me to Baen’s Bar. Hooked, reeled in and landed.
And I think that’s going to be the pattern for the future. We can learn anything, once we stop digging in our heels and realize how really cool it is.
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What’s it gonna be like as you approach your 140th birthday, instead of your 40th?
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Maybe we’ll stop counting?
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Given that such a dramatic shift in population demographics is unprecedented, predictions are in the category of “difficult and without evidence.” Has this world ever seen a population whose median age was “senior”?
But senior today ain’t what it was before now, either. Now we have centenarian marathoners and octogenarian sky-diving ex-presidents.
Does anyone think technological change is slowing with the demographic bulge moving into the 60 and up bracket? The Boomers may be turning more staid, less eager to adapt, but they (we) are still a generation with almost unlimited sense of entitlement and little sense of obligation to a broader civilisation. I am inclined to agree with MataPam: we will quickly adapt to anything useful and interesting — which ain’t necessarily a good thing.
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Well, I seem to have made a major change in every decade of my adult life, and I’ve managed so far. The last was in my 40’s – like a lot of IT programmers, my job was outsourced, and the IT jobs dried up. I went back to school, got a masters, now I’m a CPA.
Did I like it? No (especially the year of hell at a Big 4 CPA firm with all the 20-somethings), but I survived. Would it be harder now, at 51? Yes, and more because of the attitude towards post-50 people, but it’s do-able.
And when I got the masters, I noticed the older people like me were always the top of the class. And the CPA exam was no big deal. We do get smarter as we get older, we know more and have a better structure to add new information into. Just don’t stop learning.
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I don’t know if you get smarter as you get older, you gain more experience definitly. But one reason that older people are generally top in their class, people in their forties don’t generally go back to school to chase women and party, they only go to school because the need to learn something, so they tend to apply themselves much more than younger people. Also they don’t generally have a mommy and daddy willing to support them while they chase women, party, and get mediocre grades, people who support themselves, and pay for their own schooling tend to do better in school regardless of age.
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I agree with your points, bearcat, and yes, the adults are more serious about it, no question. But it’s more than that – for one thing, kids don’t have the responsibilities that adults do – no homes to take care of, no kids, no bills, no jobs a lot of the time, not to mention kids have way more stamina. :-)
But I can do things now that I would have freaked out over as a kid. I took the CPA exam and it was no sweat, and I know if I’d taken it when most people do, as a 20-something, it would have blown me away like it does all the young kids who take it. But, at my age, the material was easy for me, I’d already done far more complicated things for years. The problems you get in school can be solved in a minute or two, mostly – a long problem on an exam is 20 minutes. A big semester project is a long-ish paper or maybe a small engineering project or something along those lines – and yes, I struggled as a young college student. That’s the level I could handle.
Then we go out in the real world, and get larger and larger problems to solve, that take hours, days, months, even years as we build up our abilities. The engineers go on to build real bridges, I know people who worked on the space shuttle. And we have to do them in real world environments, not the safe school vacuum where everything’s contained. We keep reading and learning, adding to our knowledge structures. My understanding of the world is so much greater than my younger self because I’ve built on what I learned.
Intelligence is potential only, just like any talent. It means I might learn to solve problems faster, and I might be able to ultimately handle more complex problems than some, but if I don’t develop it, it’s useless. Some of the dumbest people I have ever met have very high IQs (I have a high IQ, so I can say that, I know how pointless it is) – they go around saying, “Look, I made a high score on this exam, you should all listen to me!” but never do anything beyond the schoolroom. Which is kind of like saying, “I made the top score on the drivers ed exam, so, even though I’ve never gotten behind the wheel of a car, I know more than a pro race car driver and they should listen to me.”
So never stop learning and never stop growing. :-)
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I agree about some of the dumbest people having high IQ’s, I was around a lot of those because I was in many of the ‘gifted’ classes in school, and I had the second highest SAT score in my class. I never studied for it because I didn’t plan on going to college, but I always tested well (probably because I didn’t really care except that I am very competitive, so I didn’t stress over it, but tried hard when it came down to it) Several of the people that were in my metal shop class however, who might have to count on there fingers to balance their checkbook were smarter than the high IQ people who could do calculus problems in their head. Because they had enough common sense to realize the simple facts, like that they couldn’t spend more than they made or their checkbook wouldn’t balance. I swear sometimes that there is an inverse relationship between IQ and common sense, and in my opinion the person with common sense is smarter than the person with a high IQ.
I worked for a few years surveying with a man who was dyslexic, semi-literate, and struggled with math. But he was one of the hardest workers I have ever known, had a tremendous amount of common sense, and good business sense. He applied himself and was successful, because he could look at a problem in the real world and see the solution. I respected him and considered him a smart man, just not in a way that showed on tests in the educational world, but he passed the real world tests with flying colors.
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Remember a few years back when the “multiple intelligences” talk was all the rage? You know – Spatial, Linguistic, Logical-mathematical, Bodily-kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, & Naturalistic – intelligence, all equal but some more equal than others, apparently. Most modern intelligence measures, especially IQ, are calibrated to predict academic performance, i.e., the particular qualities which result in superior performance in contemporary schools.
A few adages popular in my household are “an expert is somebody who has mastered the conventional wisdom” and “tests measure the ability to provide the expected answer.” It is a useful antidote to certain forms of arrogance. Having a naturally retentive memory and a youth misspent doing crossword puzzles I have acquired a vocabulary significantly larger than the average person, a trait which causes some people to mistake me for highly intelligent. I am, of course, but not because of the vocabulary ;-)
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