
Technology reduces the value of old people - soundsop
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/10/29/technology-reduces-the-value-of-old-people/
======
bilbo0s
This article 'rages against the machine'. Technology reduces the value of the
skills and fact knowledge of everyone, not just old people. That is the point
of technology. Information technology in particular.

The article asks:

"Want help orienting a rooftop television aerial? Changing the vacuum tubes in
your TV? Dialing up AOL? Using MS-DOS? Changing the ribbon on an IBM Selectric
(height of 1961 technology)? Tuning up a car that lacks electronic engine
controls? Doing your taxes without considering the Alternative Minimum Tax and
the tens of thousands of pages of rules that have been added since our senior
citizen was starting his career? Didn’t think so."

But these are contrived examples. Created specifically to illustrate
technology's devaluing effect on the skills of older people.

Consider these questions:

Want help with that Bresenham's algorithm code? No thanks, I use glDrawLine()
like most other non idiots. Want me to help you set up a MySQL on that server
on the internet? No thanks, I have a buck. I'll spend the first ten cents on
an Amazon RDS instance. Then a quarter on buying you a clue. I would give you
the remaining change, but there are pan handlers that are probably more
deserving.

Also contrived, created specifically to illustrate technology's devaluing
effects on the skills of young people.

My point is we don't have to fear monger.

Consider . . . what moron would hire a 25 year old hot shot instead of Werner
Vogels. Yeah . . . I don't think that moron exists either. Let's say you have
a marketing and design God who happens to be between 20 and 30. Would you
match him up against Steve Jobs? No. You wouldn't expect him to be that good
for another 20 years.

Talent is where you find it, and it is the only thing of value in a world of
rapid technological advance. Talented people have an ability to think
differently. People like this will always be valued, young or old. So let's
stop 'raging against . . .' and start 'innovating with . . .'

~~~
Maro
W. Vogels and S. Jobs are also contrived examples, being "off the charts" in
terms of success and visibility.

~~~
bilbo0s
Yeah . . . uhh . . . That would be why I called them "contrived examples".

------
mechanical_fish
Let me address Greenspun's 50-year-old friend, who says:

 _I have been declared inept by my household! It only gets worse. You are not
judged by your intelligence but by how well you do menial tasks. I have been
spiritually castrated. I am a walking corpse. The only freedom is when I
write._

Look: Google did not cause your midlife crisis. If you can't live your own
life, finding happiness in your own work (whatever it is) and not worry about
how other people "judge" you, that is too bad, and you're not the only one
(they didn't invent the term "midlife crisis" by accident) but don't blame
information technology.

Old people, as a class, probably _are_ valued less than they used to be, but
the trend is far bigger and older than Google. Part of it is that there just
are a lot more old people _around_ than there used to be. Part of it (as
others have said here) is that in a literate society books and recordings can
substitute for the old person's job of remembering things -- but that trend is
a thousand years old and more. Part of it is the change in family size and
migration patterns: Let's face it, other people's kids have always been less
likely to honor you than your own kids, and it's hard to be respected by your
kids if they lead independent lives many miles away. And a lot of it is just
the nature of American culture: The American ideal is someone who is always
moving, looking forward, and reinventing themselves. We've _always_ been big
on the young: They're the ones with the most future, and it's all about the
future!

None of which is causing your midlife crisis either. If you think it's
miserable to be a healthy middle-class 50-year-old in the 21st-century USA,
_you need counseling_.[1] Because I'll bet you wouldn't actually trade places
with a random 50-year-old in, say, the 17th century: Perhaps you'd be more
honored and respected for your venerable wisdom, but you'd also probably be a
subsistence farmer, honored mainly to the extent that you managed to have a
lot of kids and keep them alive.

Before you complain that nobody listens to you anymore, try and think about
the 6.5 billion people in the world who have _less_ voice than you do: Less
money, less education, less political power, less opportunity. [2]

\---

[1] Probably from someone older than you. ;)

[2] Given that we're talking about a friend of Greenspun, 6.5 billion is
almost certainly a gross underestimate. Think "the population of the Earth,
minus epsilon".

~~~
raganwald
_If you think it's miserable to be a healthy middle-class 50-year-old in the
21st-century USA, you need counseling._

There are lots of unhappy people in the First World. Telling them that they
should be happy because of how much worse things could be is the equivalent of
telling a child to eat their broccoli because there are starving children in
Africa.

I liked your comment enough to upmod it, but this argument struck me as being
considerably less insightful than the (excellent) rest.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I agree completely. When I say "you need counseling", I'm not trying to be
flip. Seriously: _If you're having a crisis, you need counseling_. You don't
need to look all over the world for some sort of grand, sweeping, half-baked
objective theory for your unhappiness ("information technology is making my
life miserable"). Instead you need to look much closer. You need to talk to
friends, loved ones, psychologists, career counselors, priests... whatever.
Unhappiness is not an easy problem to solve, logic won't solve it for you, and
the answer is as likely to be something trivial and personal as it is
something grand and sweeping.

My writing appears to be a total failure today, not surprisingly. [1] I'm not
trying to offer up objective reasons for why one should be happy because I
expect them to _convince_ anyone to be happy. Of course that won't work!
Happiness doesn't work that way. I'm offering them up as a counterexample to
the idea, implicit in the original essay, that one's unhappiness at age 50 is
necessarily related to some large-scale objective trend. It isn't. Because,
I'd argue, large-scale objective trends suggest that a healthy middle-class
American 50-year-old should be on top of the world. And yet many of them are
unhappy anyway. I'm sorry about that, but I see no reason to believe it's
Google's fault.

\---

[1] I should note, for the record, that I'm fighting the swine flu, and I'd
have a 102-degree fever right now if it weren't for the awesome power of
modern drugs. ;)

~~~
raganwald
Get well soon.

------
JCThoughtscream
I am often outclassed by people decades older than me and less caught up on
social networking trends, Web x.0 fads and whatnot, but with more technical
depth of knowledge in the fields that do fundamentally affect me. It isn't
that old age makes an old person irrelevant - it is very much that old age
isn't an excuse to not be curious and to not /keep learning/.

Have we truly forgotten about one of the oldest Aesops? The tortoise beat the
rabbit out of sheer, bloody-minded perseverance - and even in an era where
one's mental agility and flexibility is heavily hyped, there is still very,
very large demand for actual /mastery/.

~~~
jonny_noog
_... it is very much that old age isn't an excuse to not be curious and to not
/keep learning/._

My thoughts exactly. I've worked with older people who lost the curiosity to
keep learning about new developments in their field many years ago, and I've
worked with older people who have retained their curiosity. I find in a
functioning workplace, the former are often relegated to what is jokingly
referred to at my current workplace as "special projects", which is code for
"soon to be shown the door", the latter are very highly valued.

------
TrevorJ
This article is a product of a culture so narcissistically in love with our
own perceived greatness that we cannot conceive of anything of value being
created outside that which we've built ourselves in the last five minutes.

Have we really allowed out existences to become so abstracted from the reality
of what we need as humans to survive and thrive that we really believe
technology is the only sort of skill worth having?

This article smacks of someone raised on MTV and happy meals.

Also:

Give me your average 30-something desk jockey and I'll send him out to work
the farm with my 73 year old grandfather who's never spend a day of his life
behind a desk. If the desk jockey can keep up, then we can talk.

~~~
jerf
It is true that older people still have things to offer (if I may put it so
crassly)... but that doesn't make it any less true that they have much less to
offer than they used to. There isn't much you can do about that.

After all, the article itself pointed out that older people still have stores
of wisdom, but where a young person may want to hear about how to make his
crops grow better from any source that has that info (especially after your
first crop failure), young people in general aren't looking for moral
guidance. (Again, until after it has failed them somehow, which tends to take
more than one year. They'll learn such things just in time to be ignored by
their own children.)

There has been a fairly objective sea change here. It's not just narcissism,
in fact I don't think it's narcissism at all.

~~~
TrevorJ
We _perceive_ as a culture that they have less to offer because we have
shifted our measure of value. Whether our perception proves accurate is going
to have to be proven out by time. I say that it will not be proven correct.

~~~
jerf
What's "perceived" about the fact that we don't need them to give us
typewriting tips? What's "perceived" about the fact that I really have no need
to spend quality time with my grandparent fixing an engine from the 1930s?
What's "perceived" about the fact that most people don't need to learn how to
can food?

It's not perception. It's fact.

I say this as someone who in fact spends a lot of time with my grandparents,
has spent the last three weekends canning applesauce and visiting my
grandparents in the hospital, unlike all of my other several cousins. This is
because I am a whacko that actually does value their wisdom, their life
stories, and some of the store of "ancient wisdom" like how to preserve your
own food and advice on gardening from people who have been doing it for half a
century. I've walked the walk here. But this only further strengthens the
observation I have that there isn't much else I need to go to them for,
compared to what might have been useful 200 years ago.

Their entire value isn't gone, but there are huge swathes of value that are.
Bemoaning that fact won't change anything. I mention this because you need to
look these facts in the eye if you're going to be able to do anything about
it. Waxing rhapsodic about entirely hypothetical values isn't going to change
anybody's mind on anything. The only way you're going to care is if you look
the situation dead on, see the truth, and react to it.

And many will still choose to not care about moral wisdom or how to preserve
food or anything else like that. I disagree with them, but such is life.

~~~
TrevorJ
I'm confused about your point - you seem to be arguing against yourself here.

Yes, there are huge swaths of knowledge that by certain, subjective metrics
won't be useful to certain people, but the same could be said about a lot of
things. I don't need to know the same stuff that an architect needs to know
for example.

I guess the basic fallacy I take issue with is that people are now measuring
the value of a person based on the relevance of the knowledge that person has,
and I feel that our value as people goes far beyond that.

~~~
jerf
You're being emotionally fuzzy, because you are refusing to make value
judgments, a grave cognitive hazard of the current postmodern philosophical
regime. I say instead that there's more than one relevant definition of
"value". Are old people less "valuable" because we have no use for their
wisdom? It does not diminish their dignity and "final worth" as human beings,
but yes, there are useful and valid definitions by which their value is less.
They are not all the value definitions, but the set is not empty. Jamming a
single-dimensional definition of value on top of my posts will definitely make
them look incoherent; that certainly doesn't surprise me much.

Your way of thinking leaves you unable to understand why the 50-year-old in
the article feels the way he does. Of course he's valuable, right, and you
should tell him to buck up, right? Well, it's true that he's still valuable,
but it is _also_ true that he has identified a real problem that you can't
solve by just telling him he's valuable. I don't know what the exact solution
for this person is, but it's more than just trying to load up on empty self-
esteem.

Emotionally fuzzy thinking is a great social signal ("man, shouldn't we just
love everybody?"), but it's a terrible way to solve problems like this guy's;
indeed, take this tack and you'll just further alienate him. There's a real
problem here.

~~~
TrevorJ
I would argue that the problem with broad generalizations and fuzzy
definitions comes not from me, but from the article in question. The logical
fallacy in the article is that he seems to be equating perceived value in the
modern workforce with human worth as a whole.

I agree absolutely with what you are saying: there are different definitions
of value depending on the arena in question. The issue is that we seem to be
taking one area (technology) and equating it with all others, which as you
say, isn't useful or valid.

I've enjoyed our discussions :)

------
rivo
Elderly people have never been my primary source for facts or technical
instructions. I went to the library or asked experts any age before the
Internet came around. It's the experience and the subsequent insight which is
extremely hard to replace by technology.

Real life example: I'm always in search of good recipes. For sure, there are
tons of good recipes out there. But there are even more bad ones out there. In
my experience, user rating systems only help to a limited degree. Even then,
I'm facing a long web search and I typically have to try many of them out
before I arrive at a good one. On the other hand, I collect recipes from
grandmothers and grandfathers. They have never failed me. Why? Because they've
been practicing them for 50 years.

------
dangoldin
By the same reasoning technology reduces the value of all people. But as long
as we're all reduced we can still stay competitive to one another.

~~~
dkarl
Exactly; the old now compete with the young. It used to be that people's value
morphed from physical capability to knowledge as they aged, but these days,
you can keep doing the same work your whole life.

The downside is that you can't look forward to relaxing and coasting on your
accumulated knowledge. You can only look forward to relaxing and coasting on
your accumulated wealth.

------
GiraffeNecktie
What do I value in old people? Patience, compassion, wisdom, experience, self-
awareness, skepticism, faith, perspective, financial maturity, honesty,
thrift, perserverance, self-sacrifice, wit. Not only does technology not
diminish any of that value, I find that technology makes those qualities even
more valuable.

~~~
randallsquared
I think a lot of those attributes are less valuable in today's world, mostly
for technological reasons. :)

Patience: everything from fast food to ATMs to self-checkout at the grocery
has made patience nearly unnecessary compared to a hundred years ago.

Wisdom / experience / skepticism / perspective: most of what passes for
'wisdom' is merely knowledge; many such things are right (but mostly can be
Googled), and many such things are wrong (because the sample was too limited
-- the saw about anecdote vs data applies). In any case, I think it's far more
rare to be wise than old. All these seem like they're aspects of the same
thing.

Faith: Unless you meant 'trust', I'd say this isn't a net good, anyway. If you
did mean 'trust', then I'd say it goes more with youth and innocence than the
elderly.

Financial maturity: I grew up poor, and having lots of poor, old people around
will disabuse you of the notion that older people are necessarily financially
mature; this is more a function of class than age.

Honesty: With pervasive surveillance, we're about to be forced into being more
honest than people have ever been. This is actually more likely to affect the
young first, rather than the old, as various MySpace and Facebook scandals
have already shown. At some point, people will begin acting as though
everything they do is on camera. Some of us already are.

Thrift / self-sacrifice: There's less and less need for this, as we're
immensely more wealthy than we used to be, and in spite of the gloom and doom
about the economy, that's likely to continue without some really massive
government intervention.

Perserverance / wit: These seem like personal qualities independent of age, in
my experience.

I accidentally downvoted you (while selecting text); sorry. :(

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
Patience: The little things are faster butthe big things don't change much.
Technology does not speed up raising a child, preparing for retirement,
learning a language, understanding what my life's about.

"Most of what passes for 'wisdom' is merely knowledge" - Perhaps. But I'd also
suggest that many young people wouldn't know wisdom if it bit them on the ass.
And no, wisdom can't be "googled".

Faith: No I don't mean trust. And I don't mean religion.

Financial maturity: I'm not saying that old people are "necessarily" anything.
But people that have learned to manage their affairs through many decades may
have learned something useful. I'm just saying.

Honesty: Personal surveillance? WTF? I'm not talking about stealing candy bars
from the corner store. I'm talking about living long enough that you're
comfortable being real with the world.

Thrift/self: "There's less and less need for this" Oh really?

Perservance / wit: I do respect and admire the perserverance of someone who's
ploughed through four years of graduate school. I have tons of respect for
someone who's been on the line for their family/colleagues/whatever for 50 or
60. I find young people often mistake being clever for wit.

------
jrwoodruff
_Perhaps the answer is for every old person to become an expert personal
computer and network administrator._

Really? We're so wrapped up in technology that my Grandma is now considered
useless unless she can help me setup my home media server?

Despite growing up with technology, I learned many, many things from my
elders, including work ethic, money management, respect for others and an
appreciation for simpler things in life, like gardening and carpentry.

I _think_ I know what he's getting at, but I really just found this article
absurd. There is, and will always be, more to life than bits and bytes.

------
noonespecial
_I have been declared inept by my household! It only gets worse. You are not
judged by your intelligence but by how well you do menial tasks. I have been
spiritually castrated. I am a walking corpse. The only freedom is when I
write._

The "outsourced mind" devalued the old. The outsourced body is coming. Wait
'till the young get acquainted with the robots that will devalue them.

------
jcdreads
I love that just from the title, before clicking and without even having yet
seen the little (harvard.edu) beside it, I knew _immediately_ that this was a
Greenspun article.

------
rubinelli
There is a point here, but I think Greenspun is 2 or 3 orders of magnitude
wrong in the time scale. The elderly haven't been revered as the only
repository of wisdom since the invention of writing, and the invention of the
press accelerated the process. It made sense for villagers to take the
outliers to the elders, because they were the only ones with some chance of
having relevant experience, but their influence diminished as books became
common and cheap. The elderly became mostly cheap labor for menial tasks like
mending clothes or going to the bank, the kind of work that automation
eliminates.

~~~
sophacles
I don't know -- looking someting up in a book, even with a decent computer
index, is still orders of magnitude slower than a googling it.

~~~
evgen
The difference is that when you "google it" you have nothing but a pile of
undifferentiated facts and opinions without any context. Just knowing the
right book to consult is sometimes a more valuable skill than being able to
select the right keywords for a web search. The fact that so few seem to
understand the difference between collecting facts and actually mastering a
subject is painful to watch.

------
rimantas
The proper way to put it would be "technological progress reduces the value of
the knowledge of outdated technologies", which is then reduced to "Doh" at
which point one can question the need of blog post about it.

------
sb
One thing that comes to mind regarding _wisdom_ of the elders is certainly
dealing with life itself. Of course there is a lot of factual information
easily retrievable using the internet, but this is only one side of the coin.
What about non-factual, personal information? What about emotions? What about
life and death?

These are points where the wisdom of every "old" person becomes apparent--
something we seldomly realize before hitting the age where suddenly people
start dying, some friends parent, your own grandparents, etc. One cannot find
solace in Wikipedia here, and most often these events present life-changing
turning points, where one realizes that putting in the extra hours is probably
not worth it all, smoking actually kills people, and whatever caused the death
of those near to you.

Consequently, the elders the article deals with might not know how to do that
stuff or use the internet, i.e., are less tech-savvy. But every single one of
them most certainly is more life-savvy, which comes in handy, too.

~~~
k0n2ad
I hear you. There is something about face to face human connection that will
never be lost, as long as we are still human. Encyclopedic knowledge is only a
fraction of human value.

------
raphar
I see that the Human dimension is missing in the article and some of the
comments.

Yes, sure you can google whatever you may need to know. But is useful to
search how to deal with your 12 month baby, for example? You can search about
her education, her games, comunication, etc... But all you get is a
contradictory mess as a response. Will you get the habit of patience from the
web? you'll need it with your daugther.

The same goes with all sort of inherently human issues. You can google about
communicating, leading, working with people, but until you incorporate the
knowledge you need, you will never be better than a person that has been doing
that for 5 years. Google, won't accelerate those 5 years, as it won't sort
what material is good for you (wont coach you), won't practice for you either.

So, I'm for giving to the machine (google?), what the machine best does, and
for all the other stuff, you need humans. (with experience if possible)

ps: Google, won't launch your startup

------
10ren
As the title says, he's talking about technology. Everyone knows technology is
a young man's game.

The law is an old man's game. When you read an article about the latest case
or legislation, the first thing they talk about is what the law was 200 or 300
years ago, and move forward from there. The law doesn't throw out old case-
law; it builds on it. In this way, it remains predictable (so parties don't
have to go to court to find out what the law is), it retains basic principles
(e.g. fairness doesn't change with technology), and it acts as a drag rather
than a kite, so it is a moderating force. While the law is often behind the
times, that is far, far less dangerous than the alternative.

IOW Judges are old.

------
chubbard
My grandma's wisdom on marriage "Cooking lasts, kissing don't."

My grandfather and I refinished a cabinet and stained it. He had us smoothing
out the stain with our bare hands because the brushes left strokes in the
stain while telling me original stains where made from ashes and dirt. Hence
the name of stains like burnt sienna. I don't know if he was pulling my leg or
just talking crazy, but I love that experience much more than a google search.
I still laugh about how crazy that day was.

~~~
evgen
He was correct. That pigment came from oxidized (burnt) clay that was
originally mined around Siena, Italy. If you visit the city (highly
recommended) you should catch a sunset in the piazza there and watch the rays
of the setting sun play across the buildings constructed with bricks from this
same clay; you will never wonder about the origin of that color again :)

------
TrevorJ
I've said this before, but it's an argument that needs to be stated again: As
long as humans are in control of technology then a deep and experiential
understanding of human nature and behavior will always be more valuable than
technological skill in certain fields. Finances, management, government,
business strategy, psychology, diplomacy. Wisdom is more valuable than
technological skill in these and many other arenas.

------
teeja
"Reduces the value of." That would be a value judgement (not to mention a
glittering generality if applied to all geriatrics).

Well let's say "usefulness". What is the value of 60 years of experience?
Depends on the experiences, and the context. A woodworker's skills don't age,
so long as they're maintained by practice. Programming language (non-
algorithmic) skills age exponentially faster. For really complex problems,
like human ones, an understanding of the dimensions of life and its
complexities is never big enough; thus long experience lends greater
perspective.

I've found that whenever I think I know something about someone I don't know,
that illusion goes away once I get to know them ... unless their 'life' has
consisted of nothing but being 'useful'.

------
marze
Higher health insurance premiums are probably to blame for a good part of the
desire firms have to hire younger people.

A simple improvement to skyrocketing health care costs would be to eliminate
employer provided plans and let everyone buy a plan on the open market.

~~~
anamax
> Higher health insurance premiums are probably to blame for a good part of
> the desire firms have to hire younger people.

That's why we should tax younger people to pay for older folks' healthcare.
Medicare's 3% is just the start - single payer will let us (I'm older than
most of you) bleed them in ways that they'll never figure out. (Heck - they
haven't figured out social security.)

Then again, that's not a high bar - they haven't figured out that there are
lots of ways to cover pre-existing and catastrophic that don't involve inter-
generation subsidies. Throw in some rhetoric and they'll even think that
you're doing them a favor.

------
jimbokun
I just remembered reading this:

[http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2009-09-17-young-...](http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2009-09-17-young-
people_N.htm)

"The incomes of the young and middle-aged — especially men — have fallen off a
cliff since 2000, leaving many age groups poorer than they were even in the
1970s, a USA TODAY analysis of new Census data found."

So, looks like the fundamental premise of this post is in error. It is the
young who's economic utility is in question right now, if the market is to
judge.

------
ivenkys
Is this supposed to be some sort of a sarcastic or humorous piece ?

Yes, old people _may_ not be tech-savvy but of course there are lots of
counter-examples to this and yes technology is not the _only_ thing in life so
why take painfully contrived technology based examples ?

Then , there is the whole definition of _old_ , my boss considers me a
whipper-snapper , my Boss's son considers me an old guy.

So, what new insight does this blog post bring ?

------
Pistos2
"reduces the value of old people" This phrasing really sticks out for me.

You have value by virtue of being a human being. If the society you are a part
of ever comes to lose sight of that, your very life would become endangered.
("Not considered valuable; make room for the valuable.")

People are not tools. People are not a commodity. People are not means to an
end.

------
gcheong
I get much value out of this: <http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays> and it just
wouldn't have the same weight of experience in my mind if it were some young
person saying these things (it's possible it is just a young kid making this
up but it has more weight in my mind thinking it's an older person).

------
huherto
Judgment becomes better with age. That is a pretty big advantage. Also, as you
get older you can get assets that later on work for you.

------
edw519
data != wisdom

a computer != a human brain

logic != emotion

Otherwise, you wouldn't need things like y-combinator, Hacker News, or Startup
School. Hell, we wouldn't even need each other. We'd just google _everything_.

------
Mz
Generally speaking, I think old people are valued less than they used to be
because it takes less wisdom to grow old than it used to. It used to be only
really wily, wise individuals had much hope of getting really old. Then we
invented antibiotics and such and now virtually any idiot can live to a ripe
old age. Then someone looks around, realizes we no longer revere our elderly
and starts coming up with an explanation.

In some sense, it's true: "Technology" has made our old people less valuable.
But I don't think it's so much because it has made wisdom less valuable. I
think it is more that old age is no longer a strong proxy for wisdom like it
was historically.

------
clistctrl
I'm 22, not old by any standards. The value from "old people" isn't what they
can do for me right now (its my turn) its what they did for me long before I
existed. Without old people building all this great infrastructure, I would
not be living the great life I have now. Feel free to keep taking money out of
my paycheck to pay for their medication, I hope my grandchildren will do the
same.

