I think there’s 2 factors at play. 1) they grew up with technology rather than having it introduced later in life and 2) they grew up with a version that is arguably quite negative.

For e.g millennials, we didn’t have internet until our teens, and the early years of the internet looked very different from the ad-infested hellscape that it is today.

Those younger generation are in a really dark place right now. In many cities they will never be able to afford a house; and on top of that AI labs are now saying they will never have a job.

And the guys outside the AI labs are saying they won't even reach adulthood.

And the teachers are saying they can't even read and that they're dumber than the previous generation.

Maybe reading is going the same way as a typewriter or knowing how to mill grain between two big stones?

We don't need the ability to read. We need the ability to convey and understand -- audiobooks can do this, for example.

Teachers have said that about every generation since time immemorial.

Thankfully anyone who dealt with a teacher knows how much value their opinion holds.

One of main reason i postpone having kid. I definitely don't want to bring my child to this current world. Unless i see some better future, i don't think i will change my plan anytime soon.

You need to zoom out a bit, too much narrow focus HN style can be pretty toxic in age of ai. Tons of folks here have obsessive traits and this is perfect tool to hone that crack in personality further and go deeper and deeper.

Or, in other words, world is fine, will be fine and whatever comes societies will adapt. Don't have kids if you don't want to but llms shouldn't be the deciding factor. Think how late 1930s must have felt apocalyptically in Europe and rest of the world, yet we came through that stronger (and then got weaker but thats another story) and mankind goes on.

Given a choice, a vast majority of children (and people in general) would choose to have a life, even with arguably uncertain future prospects, over not getting to live at all.

The real reason you're postponing parenthood is probably that you choose to prioritize your comfort and financial independence at this moment. And there is nothing wrong with it, but I do miss honesty.

This is an insane framing.

What's insane is that there's seemingly an account made just to post this useless comment, in a thread buried several levels deep, under an, for HN standards, old post.

I used to think like this. People were having kids while bombs were falling around them, I think we can manage.

I sympathize with the scariness of never being able to own a house. But I also think between Automation and remote work, what we really need is to encourage the development of like 50-100 new tier 1 cities in the US. Part of the major cost is the fact that you have to deal with the old before you can get to the new in these cities.

Whereas a field 5 miles off a major highway? I bet you could build a city, a better one, for half the cost.

That, or become violent. I'm not saying that in a supportive way, moreso thinking of uprisings historically arising from people with no other option. Although, that was before facial recognition technology...

Historically people needed to starve a little for this. But perhaps energy shortages might do it today.

This was predicted by Jack Womack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_Acts_of_Senseless_Viole...

They didn't need facial recognition technology because they were physically in one place and the cops could just arrest everyone in that place - if there were enough cops which there never were.

I bet they wouldn’t radicalize and elect people with bad intentions in mind.

And on top of that they'll have to deal with crumbling infrastructure, aging population and global warming. They've already had COVID. I hope they don't have a catastrophic AI bubble pop.

Poor kids.

> In many cities

In like five cities in the USA. I live in a top 10 city by population in the USA (so it's not "flyover"), and the median home price is 288–319, while median HHI is 89. That's easily in the recommended home loan range of 3*HHI.

Look, I'm sorry you can only be happy living in SV, but there's plenty of jobs in the boring parts of America, and the homes are affordable.

All that being said, homeownership is largely a scam, financially. Use your downpayment as a market investment and rent. You'll end up with more money when you retire, and as a bonus, you aren't tied to one geographic location if you lose your job.

The only reason apartments can even exist is because of economies of scale. If you have one rental property, it's virtually impossible to make money (certainly not in a way that outpaces index funds) because you don't have the economies of scale at your disposal.

Your entire premise is one that's missing important context. Based on the numbers you provide, you're probably in Chicago or Dallas, maybe Austin, but that's pushing more like 400K.

Homes in the median are generally not viable unless you don't have a family or don't care about quality schools. In my city (90K), two houses that are identical but divided by the school district boundary between rank #1 and rank #265 out of 359 is a difference of $300K. One would be within the median and the other well above.

And let me be clear: ALL HOUSING IS A SCAM FINANCIALLY. Rent screws you one way and housing screws you another.

"Quality schools" are almost entirely about the student body, so it doesn't really make sense to say median schools aren't viable for the median family. Obviously you're not going to get a ton of doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc. kids at a median school because the median person is not one of those things, and those people tend to care about "quality schools" i.e. living near each other and away from the median.

Median income probably also matches closer to Millennials, not Z and certainly not Alpha.

Do we really want people to have no association with their city, and encourage them to be interchangeable cogs for whatever business deigns them worthy of a job in some remote part of America, so they can be ready to take whatever’s offered like that’s a good thing?

Most people like putting down roots, knowing the town and people, having a local community, would like to have family and friends nearby.

It's too late. The industrial revolution destroyed this.

I hired a few contractors out of the bay area to another state where their salary was 1/3 a nice permanent home and they ended up scattering to other parts of the country. One even went back to the Bay Area. Yes there are nice places to live besides the bay area.

Mortgage pretty much always costs less than rental per square foot.

Right, but the opportunity cost of the down payment is what gets you. You're forgetting that if you rent, you have a large chunk of cash that you could invest in higher yielding assets.

This isn't controversial. This is what anyone with finance expertise will tell you.

Yeah but real estate is something even people with seriously subpar IQ understand well, like gold. Its a conservative investment in most places, but risk of losing it is next to 0 realistically, which is something folks like a lot. Those that invested 20 years ago in many cases saw massive returns, in very safe manner. Not even going into airbnb and similar.

Also, if your down payments on mortgage are equal to rental fees, you won't save much renting, you just have better flexibility with moving, something great for single folks but families want opposite. In our case, for example we pay less mortgage than we would be paying in rental for same place (can check easily since symmetrical apartment next door is rented).

I don't want risky investments with potentially better returns for me, real estate is good enough.

Finance people are welcome to go live in shoeboxes and invest in higher yielding assets, clears them out of the housing market for the rest of us who value a house to live in over higher yields.

Remember how we were all going to “surf the information superhighway” and we’d all become smarter because we had access to all the worlds experts and books?

I remember!

And we did. People were not more well informed before.

Debatable. Maybe they were less informed in the sense of not having access to as much so called news or content. But what about the quality? Being strictly less informed by emotionalized info shots could very well mean being less misinformed.

Before the like button, it was more individualistic. Before web 2.0, before global market penetration had hit 10%, it was mainly early adopters.

Who clicks on the clickbait? Who upvotes the garbage? Who actually sees ads and goes to buy what they didn't need? I think we all know.

The window we saw may have been one of an illusive sub-population who is forever on the treadmill trying to get away from the unwashed masses.

More likely the adoption increasing to near 100% made it a prime revenue source opportunity for bad actors.

Not everything is Silicon Valley stereotypes trying to feel special.

They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.

>> I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.

> They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.

You and the GP are talking about totally different things.

Also the OP is talking about elementary schoolers. Even as a future software engineer interested in computers in the pre-smartphone era, my computer knowledge in elementary school was still pretty basic.

My son (11) constantly refers to kids like this as 'ipad kids'. He has a PC and has taught himself to program, so I think he looks down on kids like this, which seems to be the majority of them.

We're wasting the potential of at least two generations. It's horrible.

Well, if the frontier AI labs get their way the development of the brains of the next generation is wholly unnecessary. I expect they feel as much deep in their bones as they sit through the drudgery of school without a future to put any of it to use.

The damage done by doomscrolling and social media goes far beyond the "development of the brain for reasons of economic participation". Also, you seem to think the development of the brain doesn't have any purpose beyond that - a view I don't share.

If - and that if is doing some heavy lifting; given the underlying, fundamental problems of LLMs it doesn't make any sense to assume that we'll get there anytime soon - LLM AIs will be able to dominate economy in such a way that humans cannot compete anymore, that simply means that humans will have tons of free time at their hands. ( There's a reason for the grain dole that the Roman elites handed out to the poor of the city. I assume if you have a whole population that doesn't have anything valuable to contribute to the economy, the economy will still have to find a way to sustain them. Otherwise riots.)

A well developed brain seems to be exactly what I would want in such a case.

Tonnes of free time, an undying need for validation from other humans, and an inability to tolerate boredom. The way to compete and gain status will be through violence. If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.

You're describing the human condition.

That hasn't changed for the last 300k years.

The condition hasn't. The conditions have (in most places). So, I'm expected a regression to the mean. I don't see that as a positive, desirable development.

The use of personal computers way overshot what they were designed for. Don't mistake people putting up with the relative complexity of personal computing with them wanting it. That's why so many people no longer bother with PCs or keep an old one around just for things that need to be done and through the web. Phones, primarily, and tablets for media consumption, are much easier to use.

Try explaining a clutch and stick shift to kids. They will look at you and wonder why and how you think having a pedal that decouples the engine from the rest of the drivetrain so you can manually operate a gear lever was appropriate for a mass market product.

They can't use a Windows-95-style filesystem for the same reason I can't use IBM-style JCL and COBOL. That is not the entire field of computing, in fact it's barely any of the field of computing which is the reason they can't use it. Just because that paradigm was once dominant, doesn't mean it still is.

But they are all still using traditional file systems constantly, but usually through an abstraction that gives them less understanding and control. Dragging stuff around on a smart phone is often changing some files and folders under the hood. The knowledge of how things work one step down the abstraction layer is still valuable for anyone who wants more than the lowest level control and understanding of what they're doing.

Not really any more than I have to understand journalling to use sqlite.

And what replaced it? Can you do the same tasks within that unstated "new paradigm"? Not knowing how to use a desktop computer limits you from all creative software from IDEs to video editors. That's like saying illiteracy is just a new oral paradigm.

I don't know the details because I haven't used one, but yes there are video editors for phones and tablets.

You're correct, if we're being pedantic.

But will you be hired to do video editing on a tablet? REAL work like for a media company or movie studio? No. ipad skills are mostly irrelevant if your goal is to be employable. The advanced animations and workflows are not being done on tablets. Most people like being employable.

At least kids in the 90s learned how to use a desktop, which directly translated in some way to an office job.

And there's a good reason we aren't seeing many videos edited on phones, just as programs written on iPads (RDP notwithstanding).

Aren't we? Pixar isn't making their movies on phones, but how about your average influencer?

Do they have the motivation to learn though? You could say the same about gen Z with books; it's just that many have never cared enough to make it a habit.

That having been said, the new generation mostly does computing with a smartphone/tablet and these kids are very adept at handling them. If a child wants something, it'll find a way to make it happen and they're good at that. Creating spreadsheets and organizing files is simply not on their list. If it were, they'd be better at it than most people who grew up before computers.

Haha.

My son got caught trying to fix Windows installation on my wife work computer with bootable Linux Mint USB stick.

"Digital Naive," yes, of course.

Opposite of my experience. A few family members and their friends invited me to a discord server recently; I'll join for games some nights. They're very acutely aware of how things work. We talk a lot about how even their schoolmates don't really use social media much (at least, not the big ones) and despise AI.

Gives me some hope that the kids will be alright.

>invited me to a discord server

At least kids back then knew how to host their own TeamSpeak server ;) Clicking yourself a Discrd "server" is the easiest thing you can do.

NAT and the slow adoption of IPv6 are partly to blame for this; so are phones. To host your own anything, you need a machine that can be left turned on (so a desktop fixed in one place) and an IP address.

They could 100% figure it out if TS was still a popular thing. What's with the assumption all the kids these days are utter zombies who can't think for themselves?

Most of them are using AI for all their schoolwork while performatively hating it because "it wastes water" or some other half-understood meme.

Everyone likes slop. That's why Instagram, Tiktok and Linkedin were so popular pre-AI.

They don't like slop when they're looking for non-slop and they recognise the slop, because it's not solving their problem. If they don't recognise the slop they'll just treat it as non-slop and use it, and in this case they arguably still liked it.

As as AI gets better it'll be harder to detect slop thus people won't think it's slop.

I'm a fan of generated music and have run across some generated vids I like. I've seen some really creative stuff which took existing fiction and generated vid content around that. Previously, that content simply would not have been created because it would have been way too expensive. I know I'm not the only one out there who enjoys it at times.

There is undoubtedly some performative element, how big that is who knows?

Confessing to liking generated music is wild and legitimately embarrassing. Somehow, even compared to ripoff visual art, fake music is even more obviously plagiaristic. The stuff that it's ripping off already exists and isn't even hard to find since ALL of it is billed exactly as the style/genre that it's stealing from. That's the equivalent of framing and hanging a "ghibli style" generated print in your living room.

This is what I mean, people don't feel the same way. I find the lyrics creative enough, the style hits, that's all I'm looking for. I don't find most music on the market that interesting, anyway. I found people making music about UFOs and disclosure of all things, there isn't exactly a huge market for that. It's allowing people to express things in music they previously weren't.

This is the kind of stuff which will just cause people to be contrarian and like it because we're told it's something to be embarrassed over. People put human-created content on way too high of a pedestal.

I find it interesting that we have tools which can take a general concept and sound and create hours and hours of content out of that and I don't consider it any different than remixing human stuff, it is still human at its core.

Honestly, for the people who hate this stuff, the best thing you can do is not to mock people in this way because I promise you, that's how you get contrarians. Do you know how rude it is to be told that what you like is legitimately embarrassing? What caused you to say that to another human being? Come on!

Well they used to. Make music about UFOs and such, I mean.

Woke up this morning, I was feeling quite weird, Had flies in my beard, my toothpaste was smeared Over my window, they'd written my name, Said so long, we'll see you again ...

Did a vehicle, did a vehicle, did a vehicle come from somewhere out there, just to land in the Andes? Was it round and did it have a motor ...

Music was more interesting once.

>Make music about UFOs and such, I mean.

Fleetwood Mac, 1975, "hypnotized" comes to mind. As does "Interstellar Overdrive" by Pink Floyd

So yeah. They did.

sure, sure, and Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft by the Carpenters in '77.

But what was the name of the song quoted in the comment you responded to?

Wasn't that also a song about UFOs and such and didn't that comment explicitly already acknowledge such songs existed?

Some people eat at Chipotle every day

Error: unpopular opinion detected

If nobody likes it then why do they all make and use it? Revealed preferences.

Do you like carbon monoxide? No? Then why do you make and "use" it?

Maybe breathe and let your brain have some oxygen to think about the answer to your own question.

Wearing your second job uniform while working doesn't reveal a preference for blue jackets, it just means you'd like to not be fired.

Not sure why you felt the need to throw in a random insult there but I'm sure you already know the answer to the difference between making something voluntarily and involuntarily.

Apologies, I intended the oxygen bit as a flippant joke but I can see how that could come across as an insult instead.

As to the difference between voluntary and involuntary, the grey line between those is exactly my point. The employee 'voluntarily' wears blue jackets and could certainly not wear one, and risk getting fired, and certainly could quit that job. A student certainly could spend far more time than their peers on study and end up with a lesser grade on their work, with presumably less returns in most cases. I see a lot of parallels between a teenage student navigating complex new social relationships and learning their way through middle and high school and an employee trying to just earn enough money for rent, in terms of both of them having to make 'choices' that do not feel from the inside like decisions they make freely and that have consequences that appear life-ruining to not take (in which case it reveals a preference for not having your life ruined, rather than for whatever it is that you decided to wear or use or do to merely keep up with the perceived requirements).

there's no way you actually didn't understand what I meant right?

using LLMs to learn for example is not the same as enjoying AI slop posters/art etc

I'm talking about the latter. Lots of people make slop art and use AI slop for their school essays as mentioned above. Just a few days ago we had this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49764791

I'm not one bit surprised that you'd use the path of least resistance to do some essay that you could care less about.

hating AI slop overall like seeing it in shirts or something like that is not performative.

That's the part that's performative, they use it, and maybe even like using it, but then outwardly say how much they hate it. I feel like you're not getting that point about what others here are saying.

because nobody says "I hate x y and z uses of AI", especially the youth.

like with that logic, everybody loves AI and all the uses of it because they're not being specific enough in their speech

They like some uses of it, but say they hate all of it, that is the performative part.

I don't think anyone hates all of AI except a minority

and even if you would hate AI, you don't really have a choice anymore since employers will expect you to be more productive due to it

but I definitely see a bunch of hate towards the dystopian aspects of it and as mentioned before, the whole slop thing and how you see AI slop everywhere now. it definitely evokes a very negative feeling in me when I see something like that

That's our point. No one hates all of it yet some people such as some of the Gen Alpha kids as shown in the article performatively act as if they do. Sounds like you're agreeing with us here in this thread.

That doesn't refute what GP is saying at all.

If it makes you feel better, it can be rephrased as:

> Most of them are using AI for all their schoolwork while performatively hating it because "nobody likes AI slop" or some other half-understood meme

that's not "performative" though?

and how is it "half-understood"? it's simply not the same thing

People actually do like AI slop. I run into older people all the time that think its beautiful and/or fun.

Discord is definitely one of the big ones for their generation.

Every generation is full of people that have a strong aversion to tech. The mistake was thinking it would magically only be the Boomers with that problem, but I've always known people in my age group who needed that remedial tech class in college.

It did appear to improve for a little while when everyone needed a laptop or desktop to access the Internet. But smartphones have eliminated that. So have tablets. And lightweight laptops like Chromebooks have further eliminated the need for tech knowledge. I work at a K-12 school, and a surprisingly large number of young parents have access to the Internet only through their smartphones. And, truthfully, they don't need a PC to access the Internet anymore. It's an extra cost you can just bypass, and nobody under 30 with kids has spare money at this point.

But, in as much as new teachers coming into our district today are often just as tech-illiterate as those we saw 20 years ago, we haven't seen the number of tech-savvy people really decreasing, either. Tech remains a hobby for some people, and that doesn't seem to be decreasing.

Yes, we're not going to raise another generation where the techies have a common background of making MS-DOS boot disks; reading modem initialization strings; upgrading RAM requiring a chip puller or piggybacking; managing IRQs, memory addresses, or bus addressing for ISA/IDE hardware with jumpers or DIP switches; or knowing what `LOAD"*",8,1` means. But that doesn't mean people aren't learning tech, having fun with it, or making careers out of it.

I can't imagine what gave you that idea. I find there is a small slice of people who actually understand technology and it's massively underrepresented by the younger generations. They have no concept of files/folders or how the computer works at any level. Their views are often half-baked (I know mine were) and the news never actually portrays what the majority are thinking. The news is much more interested in quick hits and shock pieces "Kids are going back to dumb phones" (no they aren't), "Kids are using paper maps" (nope, a few people find them quirky and treat them as art, they aren't using them).

You and he are using “understand” differently. You’re talking about understanding the internals, the components and concepts inside the box labeled “technology”; he’s talking about understanding the externalities, where that box is moving and how fast, how the box affects and alters the world around it.

Fair, but I also think that kids aren't any better at seeing the externalities. Kids are very good at following what is "hip" and it's currently in vogue to dislike AI. But just because their influencer-doom-scroll-fed brains are currently hearing "AI Bad" doesn't mean they have any actual understanding.

I'm sure this is some kind of logical fallacy but: show me a kind not on TikTok/Reels/IG/brainrot that has a coherent argument against AI and I'll be interested in listening. Outside that it's all echo chambers on social media IMHO.

This feels unfalsifiable, because you could reject any coherent argument put forth by saying that they just got this from some social media platform and they don't truly think that. The modern society and system have been picked apart relentlessly, and most of the simple arguments against it are already floating all over the place, including the short-form addiction farms.

The fact you think that not a single one out of hundreds of millions of people has a genuine belief and that they all are just dumb kids being dumb because they're kids and following trends is staggering, I don't think any adult generation has ever had an opinion this extreme about their youth.

Anyway, here's this article[0] that was posted on the NYT about a week ago. It's not about AI, but many of the interviewed kids touch on its future downsides in ways that aren't just "AI bad cuz TikTok". And these kids are young, their worldviews aren't half as coherent as a 16 year old's. They were definitely pre-selected by the editors and probably aren't representative of the average kid, but they represent some of them. That's enough for your request of n=1.

[0] https://archive.is/dw3iB

> I don't think any adult generation has ever had an opinion this extreme about their youth.

Literally every adult generation has done this for time immemorial, just like the "kids these days" or "the next generation is screwed because X". I'm not saying no kid can have genuine belief nor was I saying that no kid has a coherent anti-AI argument _but_ this article is talking about slang, just because "that's ai" is slang and has negative connotation does not, for one second, mean that kids using that are actually anti-AI. It's slang, not a policy position.

People are reading way too much into that. In 1 year the slang will have moved on and will not be the basis for how they think about AI. Go look at the history of slang, it's not policy forming in the way it's being presented by some in this thread, that's the issue I have.

Just like when kids my age said "that's gay", that didn't mean they were all homophobic, it was slang. Some of those people grew up to be actual homophobes, some grew up to be gay, some grew up to allies. The same will happen here and none if it will be due to the year/months that it existed as slang.

You know the saying “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it”? With how many salaries today are dependent on creating negative externalities, I wonder if maybe kids are better at understanding certain things like AI and climate change simply because they don’t have salaries.

Files and folders aren't fundamental to computing though.

I think the key is that young people get to approach new technology playfully, over-use it, and make mistakes.

I learned lessons as a teenager on Twitter in 2012 that clearly none of the middle-aged people posting constantly on the company Slack ever internalized.

My nephew rejects AI and took a creative writing class to get away from it.

Our college library is having a surge of requests for new fiction.

I wonder if this is a combination of burnout and good old fashioned rebellion.

Maybe the impacts but Gen Z at least the younger ones really struggle with technology. Things like file systems (even the gui kind) and the keys in a keyboard - had one ask me what’s a semicolon, he was a fully formed adult. They are not digital natives they were raised from behind the walls of the iGarden.

Better "understanding of technology", probably not - early computing and internet required a lot more technical insight, and younger generations are notoriously tech illiterate.

Insight into how it effects society? Very possibly, at the least it's a different, more native perspective. Whether it is also broader or more correct, it's hard to say.

Why? Serious question, they completely lack the context essential to understand, the previous generation does not seem to have an improved understanding either, they are just users. Consumers of ads.

Where do you live? Ipad kids here need to be explained what files and folders are. They've never even used a mouse.

That's not what OP is saying.

They're saying they have a better understanding of the impact of technology, not the specifics of using technology.

Which sounds like a soft subject on the periphery.

There’s still a massive disadvantage if you want a technical role and you think the Internet, Web and Wifi are all the same thing.

It is a soft subject.

Directories and files as computing concepts are ~50 years old while the impact of the printing press is around ~600.

The aspects of computing you deem important may be lost to time within a century, while the "soft subject" of social impact will still be felt.

That’s old technology now.

That’s like being GenX and saying millennials never learned to use a rotary phone.

Files and folders are far from old tech. It is like not knowing how to calculate 2+2.

Where do you see files and folders nowadays? They're pretty much only used by developers and some corporate offices.

They are used by literally every office worker who does their job on a computer. It's not remotely uncommon.

Google drive, icloud drive, anything drive is also file/folders based. Someone that doesn't know about that is a modern-day illiterate. Yeah, I know, there are many of them nowadays.

Are they actually? Google Drive has folders, but there's no concept of things like "which folder is this file in", you can have access to many root folders but not a list of them all, and the most convenient way to find anything is to search.

They are still present everywhere. They are just badly hidden behind a leaky abstraction.

I know this one you ask jev for that right?

I generally find younger people are better at valuing relationships over stuff

Wonderful writeup, I couldn't have formulated it better! Honestly, I never expected my comment to gain traction but I find it interesting that it had such resonance in both directions.

In a way I am happy I left so much to the imagination for open interpretation.

Understanding technology and doing something like drinking are not equivalent, what are you on about?

Because at the root of it is judgement and taste, something we are well aware they lack when it comes to the things I listed, yet somehow we're going to say they understand the broader pros and cons of AI well enough such that their use of it as a pejorative is damning of what AI is actually worth.

Absolutely not:

Do you really think young people around 14-16 understand the impact of doomscrolling & 15 sec videos on their brain capacities?

To put just one example.

I've seen the same thing in my family and relatives across all age groups, I doubt they understand it either.

The problem with that though, they don't really get to see what great feats a healthy adult brain is allegedly capable of, for example from their parents, nor their teachers if we're being honest for a millisecond. So why bother? Offline adult brains have failed at preventing any of this - nor are they more successful. It's really not brain health that predicts success in 2026.

Not understanding the consequences and impacts of doomscrolling and instant gratification videos on reasoning, memory and abstract thinking is not limited to persons aged 15-16. I'd argue this applies to about 90% of the population using smartphones.

Does your age bracket, in general?

Parents around me are somehow quite aware of the problems, some more deeper in, some less:

Esp. the ones from the education group are, agains my expectation, very well educated and up-to-date regarding problems of all this stuff. So, yes. For sure, Im in a bubble and I do not know about people & their society outside of my bubble.

OK, transferring this would also mean then that teens aware about the bad things with smoking/alkohol/etc.?

Regarding my two 12-year-old-twins, I have a different perspective and I clearly see that they need guidance, same with their folks in school.

> OK, transferring this would also mean then that teens aware about the bad things with smoking/alkohol/etc.?

Yes. Smoking and alcohol are less popular with young people than they've ever been. The social pressure and perception of smoking or even drinking as cool and rebellious have mostly vanished.

> I have a different perspective and I clearly see that they need guidance, same with their folks in school.

It depends, no one's saying that the 'aware of societal ills' position is even in the majority, but it is a considerable group, especially with the older ones. I see polarization where one group trends towards full brainrot and the other trends towards full disillusionment. Again, this is not the majority opinion, but it seems at least common enough.

It’s the opposite reason , for them social media is everything, and if that’s ai , it’s not cool , influencers don’t like it , until new ai influencers will emerge and will break a stereotype. It’s a s simple as that