[dalbasal]

>>Parents, meanwhile, can either work to balance the easy sources with...

It's possible to some extent. Different parents will have different levels of ability and success.

This is relevant (but difficult) advice for individual parents, but it's a minor point if we're discussing society. People (parents and kids) exist in an environment. "Just going out to play," isn't part of the world/environment/culture. The way kids/parents did thing differently in the past was by existing in a different culture.

Easy Vs hard stimulation is one paradigm, but you can't just view everything through this lens. Life is more complex. There are looping and knotting causal relationships and we can't know all of them. It's a complex.

Life is just very screen based. Ours and theirs.

They study via screens, and don't really know how to "do school" analogue. Social life is, largely through screens... and increasingly part of the media spectrum. Work will, eventually, be screened-based. So are life's administrative tasks.

[ClumsyPilot]

> life's administrative tasks.

Life's administrative tasks got way worse with computwrisation. Now I have to book my own flight, make sure they match with hotels, take my own reading from electric, water and gas meters, register everywhere myself and endlessly prove my indetity to hindreds of institutions.

I have an email mailbox for changes in terms and conditions that get sent to me, it is about 800 emails. If I hired a lawyer to go through them, it would probably cost $100,000

[dalbasal]

True. Arguably, work and social life have also gotten more difficult, at least for some.

Meanwhile.. it's also not overwhelmingly true that administration, and other things heavily affected by computerisation are "better," more efficient or productive.

That's easy to see in non-commercial space. It's also true in commercial space. Government. Universities. Education.

This is all tightly coupled with op's point. Digitization, computerization, networking... These really were major revolutions. They impacted and totally reformed everything. However, this has been more of a change than an improvement in many applications. Slightly better in some ways, slightly worse and others, ambiguous, mixed... complex.

The computerization of social life, entertainment.. childhood experiences. Etc. There are long causality chains.. and we don't really understand the consequences of everything.

But in any case.. I think you're absolutely right on TCs and administrative life.

Technology made it easy to have more, more complex paperwork. That allows us to produce a lot more paperwork. A handwritten contract with two lawyers present.. is a marginal cost. Even a sign here, take-it-or-leave-it contract (EG financing, or opening an account) representing some marginal cost.

Computerization makes this whole thing more efficient. Automated emails, tick-to-agree pop-ups... Those allow humanity to create many more contracts than previously possible.

That's efficiency, of a sort. If you consider contracts themselves to be an output... The efficiency gains a greater than Henry Ford's entire lifetime.

I think we've learned something. Technological change, and it's proliferation does not necessarily aggregate in an idealic way.

I think the fear of paperclip maximizing AIs.. I think this is more of an analogy to our experience with recent tech shifts.. beyond its veracity as a danger vector for AI specifically.

[oblio]

I don't remember where I read, but someone said:

Technology has made our lives faster, but not better.