Prepare for That Stupid World - is actually a very sober advice. Looking at the past few decades, it is easy to see that with each tech innovation, the world only got stupider, childish and lazier.
My Galaxy S20 gallery app had a great search feature that would find any text in any picture. I take lots of screenshots and relied on that search to find them.
I got an S25 recently and when I search for "wife" it tries to find pictures with my wife in them. But before it does that it has to ask me who my wife is. There's no way to get it to search for the word "wife." (If I'm wrong, please tell me how.) Other text searches simply don't work either.
Sometimes it's the small ways in which the world is getting dumber.
Ironically, the S20 had a decent hybrid behavior of searching by either text or object that the text represents. Whatever smarter AI they replaced it with is useless.
It's not just the youth who are lazy and stupid and childish though. (you added in the youth portion.) Do you know who the American President is and how old he is and who then voted for him?
US America is not the focal point of the world, and it’s working hard to become less and less relevant.
Also I think less than half of citizens voted for Comrade Krasnov.
In any case I was looking at a longer view - maybe we have been getting more stupid in the last decade or so but who can say for sure?
> I don’t think it’s any more true or insightful in the modern era
hmm, based on what evidence?
Or, if you prefer, based on what appeal to authority? Did you actually quote that authority properly or did you just wing it? Can you properly quote many authorities?
If you don't have good answers to those, then perhaps you have just proved the your opponents point?
Maybe there is a reason people need more compute in their key fob than what our parents/grandparents needed to pilot their ship to the moon?
“Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.”
Horace, Book III of Odes, circa 20 BCE
“Youth were never more sawcie, yea never more savagely saucie . . . the ancient are scorned, the honourable are contemned, the magistrate is not dreaded.”
The Wise-Man’s Forecast against the Evill Time, Thomas Barnes
1624
The onus of evidence is generally on the one making the initial claim: what evidence do you have that the modern world is actually getting worse?
But if you want evidence that we're improving, I'd point out that 20 years ago, the mainstream US position was that gay people were evil, 60 years ago they thought black people shouldn't be allowed to vote, and 100 years ago they thought women were also inferior and shouldn't be allowed to vote.
We can keep going back to when people thought "slavery" and "the divine right of kings" were solid ideas.
So... if people were so much smarter in the past, why did they believe all these obviously-dumb ideas?
Oh boy, let me tell you about people 60 years ago - almost none of them knew about floppy disks and they were all busy doing physical drugs at Woodstock.
