[pzo]

Wouldn’t tech illiteracy eventually die out? Millenials are good with tech and gen z even better. It’s probably still a good niche for the next 20 years. On the other hand poor fitness and mental wellbeing seems affects all age groups.

[dghlsakjg]

Tech literacy seems to be dropping with newer generations.

I taught a basic after school coding class, and the first thing I had to teach was the concept of a file, a folder, saving and loading.

These are things that everyone I went to school with understood in primary school.

Apps have abstracted it all away, and now kids just go for the search bar.

[kjkjadksj]

Gen z is more tech illiterate than you would think. I work with a few student interns in this cohort sometimes. “Copy and paste that into notepad and save it as a text file then email it to me” “uhhhh”

These kids grew up on the iphone or gsuite. They have little concept of a filesystem much less how the OS works. Its a black box. Teaching command line or writing scripts takes a lot of effort just to break out from their own wrong internal worldview of how a computer works. It’s kind of disappointing seeing what tech companies have done to dumbify this generation in terms of tech literacy.

[asveikau]

I think normies (not hn reading outliers) in Gen Z and alpha may have regressed. Younger people come up in the era of devices and apps hiding the existence of a filesystem from you.

[asynchronous]

I’d say the gap is going back to being a large canyon. Just like in the before times, nerds are hyper aware and then everything else is abstracted away for the common person. Anecdotal evidence but my take.

[tcmart14]

I don't think there is any regression. I think if anything, really overestimating how much people understood. Being a millennial and knowing a lot of other millennials and gen-xers, They can drag and drop, but they really don't understand much more than a folder is something files can go in. Files, you can tell them its fairy dust in a box and they'd believe it. Its just magic. I also work on a point of sale system with many users and clients who are gen-x and millenials, and seeing what customer support tackles, I don't think most normies ever really understood.

[tcmart14]

I think so. My only data point though is probably my grandpa. He is nearing 80 and as far as interfacing with consumer tech devices, he is just as proficient as me. The only thing I beat him on is, well, I am a software engineer, so I know how do a little bit more with the guts. I attribute it to, he worked for 'the telephone company' (AT&T) most of his life as a technician and in sales. So he for him, keeping up and learning how to work with new devices is a no brainier for him. My guess is that those of us who are younger, it'll be the same as him.

I think its more about, stuff iterates today to your much more experienced and maybe open to adapting to new iterations faster. Or like my grandfather, he work with lots of new tech continuously over his 30-40 year career. So adapting to new tech is just second nature.

[lolinder]

Tech illiteracy will only die out if technology finally plateaus. The elderly were great with the technology that was popular when they were in their forties too, the problem is that technology didn't stand still from there.

[Duanemclemore]

What constituted tech literacy 20 years ago won't get you very far today. I'm in my 40's and I see it - people my own age who ... like, they have used computers for 30 years. We were the original online generation, etc etc etc. But the number of things with family, friends, and coworkers - again my same age - which seem absolutely ridiculously simple for the terminal tech-tinkerer like myself but which trip them up is just shocking.

Tech literacy is a moving target.

[nunez]

Not at all! People are increasing _consuming_ tech, not _understanding_ it.

[CJefferson]

Companies just get better at being abusive.

I'm a professor in AI, I still wasted two days of my life disentangling a mess caused by a family member ending up with two amazon accounts attached to the same e-mail address.