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The effects of modern technology on elderly people

Nydex

The Lizard Wizard
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I just went through a funny situation involving my mother and her partner, both of whom are around 60 years old. She's been planning this trip to Italy for a while now, and has been doing all the research manually, which has understandably taken a lot of work and effort. Then I showed her how to use ChatGPT (3.5). For the past like 3 hours she's been chatting with it, asking dozens of questions, and every time it brings back an informative and well-written reply, she gets more and more jovial and excited. She's telling me how she can spend the whole night not sleeping and just talking to it, and it made me think how much differently the elder population experience this sudden and major shift in our technological landscape.

LLMs have been on the rise for a while now, but currently I believe models like GPT and Gemini are advanced enough to seem like absolute magic to people of the previous generations. I haven't seen my mother this excited and amazed by something in a while, and it's hard for me to explain to her that this is just the beginning of a shift in the collective consciousness and our innate integration with technology that is about to come in the following decades. It's hard for me to imagine what our world woud look like in 10 years, and I'm a software developer myself. Seeing how difficult it is for her to imagine it makes me realize how big of a difference there is in perspective between mine and her generation. And then there's my grandmother, who recently hit 80, who is wholly incapable of putting this type of technology into perspective and glimpsing even the slightest sliver of understanding of how it works.

It's a peculiar thing, isn't it? How novel and odd technologies appear to people of the older generation, almost as if magic. Reminds me of how people react to the psychedelic realm when they encounter it for the first time, and how the moment everything clicks together and starts making sense appears literally like magic.

I often imagine myself in 20-30 years, being in the same position. So caught up in life that I've lost track on the current technological developments to the point where stuff happening around me seems incomprehensible, almost like magic. And then I ask myself, would others around me feel about me the same way I feel about elders around me right now. Would they pity me? Would they ignore me?

Just some thoughts, nothing serious. (y)
 
Being your mother is 60, I’m going to assume that you and I are close in age..I’m 43.

I feel like we have a much different perspective on technological advancement than all of the generations before us.

I think growing up with video game, witnessing the rise of the internet, starting with a beeper in the late 90s to flip phones and then on the smart phones gives us a marked advantage to the future.

They came of age with rotary phones.

Think about it, we are the last generation to know the world without all of this, and the first to live our youth with nothing but technology.
 
Being your mother is 60, I’m going to assume that you and I are close in age..I’m 43.

I feel like we have a much different perspective on technological advancement than all of the generations before us.

I think growing up with video game, witnessing the rise of the internet, starting with a beeper in the late 90s to flip phones and then on the smart phones gives us a marked advantage to the future.

They came of age with rotary phones.

Think about it, we are the last generation to know the world without all of this, and the first to live our youth with nothing but technology.
I'm actually 30, but I agree with you. The earlier part of my childhood was spent by being outside the whole day, with the other kids, playing games and fooling around. The latter part of my childhood was spent in front of a PC. My generation caught the transition dead-center, and I'm so grateful for that fortunate timing. I've seen the best of both worlds, and it has shaped me as a person a lot.

We're living in interesting times. I'd even say the most interesting times we've ever lived in. It's just a pity that humans still are very much human, and as such, wage wars over resources and trivial differences. So much unnecessary suffering. The world's getting more and more complicated, just like McKenna was talking about in the late 90s. The complexity engine of the universe is chugging along in higher and higher RPM.

Wonder where this all will go...
 
Our perception creates the world as we perceive it. It is a recursive process in itself.

When we shift our perception our world shifts with it. We shift our perception by 'choosing' the path that isn't there and when we travel it, the world changes. Magical indeed.

This 'sandbox' of time and space, in which our perception is playing, is as beautiful as our creative ability.
 
I'm actually 30, but I agree with you. The earlier part of my childhood was spent by being outside the whole day, with the other kids, playing games and fooling around. The latter part of my childhood was spent in front of a PC. My generation caught the transition dead-center, and I'm so grateful for that fortunate timing. I've seen the best of both worlds, and it has shaped me as a person a lot.

We're living in interesting times. I'd even say the most interesting times we've ever lived in. It's just a pity that humans still are very much human, and as such, wage wars over resources and trivial differences. So much unnecessary suffering. The world's getting more and more complicated, just like McKenna was talking about in the late 90s. The complexity engine of the universe is chugging along in higher and higher RPM.

Wonder where this all will go...
You’re definitely close enough to get it haha
It’s for sure going to get very interesting.
I remember back in 2007, there was a burial at the cemetery I worked in of a woman who was born in 1895- she was 112 years old.
Let that soak in for a moment.
This woman literally witnessed horse and buggy to iPhones.
Truly mind blowing.
I feel like we are in moment of history with a vey similar timeline, if we live long enough, we are going to witness things confoundingly foreign to us, even in our present world.
 
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