It's interesting that you posted this now, Lloyd. Not long ago, I would have told you that my cell phone use was pretty low. I used to just text for messages that needed to be sent: "What to pick up at the grocery store?", "Meet you at the cafe in an hour." etc.
But in the last few months I've discovered casual texting. When I'm riding the trolley or otherwise unoccupied, I'll scroll through my contacts on my phone and just send a hello to someone I haven't seen or heard from in a while. It's terrific! My social life has improved, and I'm doing more activities like hiking.
I'm a Luddite who bemoans new gadgetry, but sometimes improvements do happen.
I would say yes, it was. In the early/mid-80, I worked for Digital Equipment Corp that had THOUSANDS of computers on a single network (unheard of at that time; not even IBM could do such). Part of the bonus is that we had the chance to "stress test" our own dogfood and much of the biz was run on VaxNotes (think forums of which CU! is one) and VTX (think websites). We were allowed to have personal SIG groups on systems that were local to locations in addition to the very technical sites supporting the various software sold to customers and personnel.
It turned out that was the beginning of online communities (and before the Web really got going). I made friends, close friends, all over the world.
And then DEC lost its way and that $12 Billion corp imploded; mostly because of no small amount of hubris and the lack of realizing that they were no longer a hardware company; they had become a software company that happened sell minicomputers (and disdained the "personal computers".
In 15 minutes, I lost all of my friends and the communities to which I was a part. Frankly, not just me but MANY of my former colleagues felt lost without the connection power of DECnet.
I invested in friends who bought a PDP-11 to set up a social media venture in Toronto in the 70s. I had fun with that machine. (Lost my investment though)
I think the screen time is a positive rather than a negative. Reading and agreeing/disagreeing with Lloyd Alter posts, socializing, keeping up with the news, mental exercise, accomplishing tasks, continued learning (and for us older folks, refreshing/recovering earlier learning)... Lloyd, I think you have this one wrong - break free from the group-think on this one.
An unrelated by-the-way. Any progress on you stopping flying - on stopping those aviation greenhouse gas emissions?
MacBook is used for work (to me those hours don't count in the way Lloyd is writing about) but I also look at the online bike forum I check multiple times daily. And I do my financial tasks on the laptop.
The most time on the iPad is reading - just as Lloyd does, I use Libby and Kindle apps on the iPad. I also typically read the NYTimes at lunch on the iPad (I work at home so there's no one to socialize with)
The iPhone (which is the last of the three devices that I acquired, BTW) is used the least, because I mostly still use a land line (!) but it is definitely my communications on the go, text and email. People know not to call me on the cell phone :-)
So I actually don't think any of this is bad. I'm still early in my late life aging process (72) and ride a bike at least 5 days a week, so I've been lucky with my health and don't need DoorDash or Uber yet. I have benefitted from some TeleHealth Zooms vs. traveling to see medical providers. I read a lot, and still read some physical books, but I'm in two book groups and one is 19th century so I can get those books easily via Project Gutenberg. As an bike enthusiast living in a small place, I love having the online bike community to discuss things with, and I've met quite a number of these folks IRL as a result. Also, we buy and sell all sorts of obscure bike stuff that otherwise might end up binned, so there's some environmental plusses as well.
As a 79 year-old who bicycles about 3 miles a day (deactivated my greenhouse-gas-emitting car about 5 years ago) I think your screens (and my screens) are a positive rather than a negative.
I just looked at my phone stats for last week. My lowest phone use was 4hrs 22min. My highest was 8hrs 30min. I'd say 2 to 3 hours a day of that is reading substack. And easily 3 hours a day listening to podcasts. So not as bad as mindless scrolling or social media but not great either. Starting a few weeks ago i have started unsubscribing from one substack every day and deleting two posts from my feed that I want to read. Trying to tone it down! Online habits are like everything else. Easy to grow / hard to shrink! 😭
All good, except for those seniors who live on rural properties. My cell phone allows me to contact friends and neighbours and order items online, which are still delivered to my door by Canada Post and other couriers. Prior to Covid, I would drive some distance each week. Texting is more convenient for everyone than phone calls...
I am in your generation and share your concern about phones, and have shared with Katherine too. I dislike phones and other hand held devices, with the exception of e-readers, which let me carry a lot of books with no weight when travelling. At home, I will take the hard copy version from the library - and ride my class 1 e-bike to fetch them. The problem is social media. It can suck you in no matter your age. I do not do Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, BlueSky, or even Linked-In. YouTube still gets me if I am not careful, then I might miss the wild turkeys in the back field, or the squirrels eating mushrooms on my woodpile. The problem is that we are now forced to use apps, whether we like it or not. Airlines have done it to me. Now you have to use the app or you have to stand in line waiting for a human to show up. Apps are really about corporations not having to pay someone to help their customers, not to make the experience better for people. The big loss with cell phones is conversation with people. The best conversations happen, for all age ranges, when cell phones are not in the room.
True. I have tried, but the system that we have sometimes restricts our options. What a group of friends and I decided to do was set up a voluntary carbon tax fund at our church. We charge ourselves 50 cents a gallon for gas, and $0.02 cents a mile for airline flights. We then use to money to give to things like solar panels on Habitat for Humanity Houses, reducing their carbon footprint with our "guilt" money. I am personally not convinced that carbon offset funds do much good. It is better to invest in real reductions, like solar on rooftops and EVs, if you have to have a car, and electric bikes for short hauls. Nevertheless we still commit the "sin" of burning fossil fuels when there is not an available alternative.
Commendable (actually, VERY commendable!) - a voluntary association of like minded people willing to gather to mitigate something they see as a problem and directly channeling their talent / labor / private property to solve that problem.
All without getting government involved - a great example of what our Founders wanted in having an expansive Society (intentional capitalization) solving its own issues instead of pawning it off to others (e.g., govt). The "great buffer" between Govt and Individuals.
"I am personally not convinced that carbon offset funds do much good. "
It seems in your eyes, your "fund" is making the difference that y'all seem to believe is needed - and without the "vigorish" that govt and other third party "carbon offset fund entities" always take out of the funds.
Both VB and I used to say "more power to you" as you were ramping up (even as we pointed out the obvious dichotomy). One can have a personal philosophy but at times, it needs to be bent to meet actual needs.
Even though the price is contributing to increasingly unprecedented human suffering and death. Sad. An irresponsible response I did not expect from you.
As much as it seems that I may be on the opposite side most of the time, on this, it should be clear. People should be able to make their own choice even when castigated by a "purist" that brooks no dissent from the Narrative (in this case, a true believer berobed in Green preaching from the book of 1st Emissions).
The Freedom of Choice should reign over being forced to your knees for a perceived enviro-sin.
Yes, I couched that in religious terms - because I lived that growing up in the fundamentalist/LEGALISTIC (emphasis on the latter rather than the former) Swedish Baptist church whose Scriptures varied from Biblical principles by devolving to a highly detailed list of "DO THESE - and risk excommunication for DOING THESE OTHER THINGS (the latter included dancing - fill in your own other blanks) instead of the uplifting messages contained in the Gospels.
Snicker - keep flying, Lloyd but know that I'm still staying on top and computing your "hamburger penance" (heh!).
Good points about social media. I also don't do the ones you listed, except that Instagram lets me see what my family members (particularly 30 year olds) are up to, and my local bike club uses Facebook to post events.
Thanks for the shout-out, Lloyd. Great article. Several grandparents have approached me lately to talk about their own screen addictions, which aligns with the Economist article you'd sent me. I'm glad you wrote about it, and maybe I'll dig into the topic, as well.
I'm 60 and I don't own a cell phone. I do, however, spend a hell of a lot of time on my laptop and of course sitting in front of a screen at work. The screen time thing is an issue. And old people seem to be quite vulnerable to dropping down social media rabbit holes and ending up with weird and unpleasant beliefs. There's a real problem here that should get more noticed.
The second thesis in the article, about people in their homes, is really a completely different essay, and a much worse one. It gets an amazing amount wrong. Right from the get-go, advocating for old people to be warehoused instead of staying in their homes is horrible. But it gets most of the details wrong too.
So, first of all, it's talking about these services that elderly people use to stay in their homes as expensive. This misses the point; what's REALLY expensive is any seniors' living scheme that isn't totally awful. Even "kept in a tiny rabbit hutch and drugged so they don't leave their bed" is pretty blasted expensive, because generally run by profiteers. Anything better than that is prohibitive for an awful lot of people. Living in the home that one has already paid off so there's no mortgage or rent, is far cheaper. Even living there while paying for some home visits and stuff is cheaper. And talking about door dash is misleading. You don't have to order restaurant meals, most people just order groceries from the same place they'd be buying groceries anyway; the surcharge is small. Similarly, there's nothing about the decision to live at one's home for as long as possible that suddenly makes the "son-in-law with tools" (or, you know, daughter in law) disappear. But for people who don't have such a person, the ability to find a handyperson online could sure be a useful option.
And sure, having walkable neighborhoods and all that would be nice. But it seems like the article is blaming the victim here. What is the takeaway? As far as I can make out, it's "If we had walkable communities, libraries, grocery stores, appropriate housing, and good neighbours it would be OK for old people to live in their homes. But since we don't, rather than using whatever IS available to try to cope, their duty is to give in and get warehoused." Of course it looks bad once you spell it out like that . . . because IT IS BAD. It's a TERRIBLE position.
Meanwhile, none of that stuff would even help my dad. He's mostly blind and can't walk far. He can't navigate a walkable neighborhood. But he's fine in his house, which is a good thing because he's stubborn and wouldn't leave it. Being able to order his groceries online is a lifesaver (luckily his vision can handle screen stuff if the magnification is turned high enough). And as he gets a bit weaker, a bit of home care will really help. This is totally feasible; my dad is in the middle of what remains of the middle class, but he has very few expenses. And on the other hand, having to live in an unfamiliar place where his life is controlled by condescending young people who think because he's old he must be an idiot, would break him. So, does the author if this article think he should just shred his life because some of what's holding it together is online services and that should be a no-no?
Frankly, this isn't written like the author even knows any old people, let alone any they care about.
There's also a commercial push for us to use our phones as mobile cash machines on the grounds that if you give your phone all of your financial information, all you have to do is wave your phone and you can ride public transport, wave your phone and you can pay for that snack or even a full meal, wave your phone and you have movie tickets, etc. etc. You can even download ebooks from your library on to your phone.
So if you really have a problem with phone use and apps, how about how people will bcome dependent on AI. Much of the data AI uses is not correct or half truths. People will not do their own research. AI will give them the first answer, and look no further. That doesn't make it the right answer, don't trust it.
As far as Boomers being clueless and young people not affording housing, I see houses going up everywhere that are huge and the neighborhoods a full of cul de sacs. These aren't boomers. And I don't see a starter home. Our first house was 620 sqft with a basement, we bought it from a couple that lived there for 35 years and raised their family there. Homes today are moderately sized at 3,000 sqft, 5,000 sqft is big but not absurd. Of course you can't afford a house. Granite is ho-hum now. I remember when Formica was a big deal.
An aside to "Much of the data AI uses is not correct or half truths."
It's called "hallucinating" (really!). It's a result of Large Language Models trying to integrate info from several different sources that may either be incorrect themselves (either Lefty or Righty biases when considering opinion pieces disguised as "news" or "information").
Or, as a number of lawyers have discovered, made up out of thin air when their briefs contain cases that never existed.
It's just like before - ALWAYS multi-check info from one site against several others. Ditto the new AI sites (pit one against the other).
But it's the expert. How can you question AI? Who are you? That's what the believers will say. Who checking to see what is going IN? Who is checking the development decision tree? Then AI creates it's own decision tree. I have a large background in Nuclear Power Safety. This would never be allowed. Does AI have the same danger as Nuclear Power? Absolutely. Does AI have the same need for national security measures as any defensive or offensive technology used or administered by the government? Absolutely. Can AI be hacked? Absolutely.
I would NEVER consider an LLM to be an "expert" having found known errors myself. It is just a tool that often is helpful - but one has to know, like with any other tool, its strengths and weaknesses. For sure, I would NEVER ask an AI to write ANYTHING for me - but it can scrape up facts that I know are out there but just can't remember where I read them (as one usage example).
And yes, I do question AI's by playing one off another. Heck, even the designers and engineers don't fully understand how the underlying neural networks are using the input tokens (weighted and parameterized) and then coming up with "answers", or hacking the input queries (either by front end chat users or engineering the LLMs on how to avoid certain lines of questions or demands - or provide query answers they know to be biased).
So yes, there are a number of ways that AI's can be hacked - through intentional training data bias as well as "engineering updates". And yes, I could classify their hallucinations as "self-hacking".
As far as Nuclear or Security usages are concerned, you have valid points. From AI's beginnings back in the 50s and 60s through to the end of the century, progress was more linear than anything else (and no, I didn't "play" in that area - just observed). In the last few years, however, it's exploded beyond, may I dare to say, our comprehension.
Think of that movie "Colossus: The Forbin Project" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id4SUleLLAA&t=6s). And non-technical people are yowling about shackling AI's with "safety brakes" now? When we don't know, after a critical size, how they do what they do?
The problem in knowing how they actually work has baffled human engineers and architects - they are just learning how to instrument them such that they can "see" (in small ways), how the neural nets are making decisions. However, the larger the LLM (or any of the other 15-20 kinds of large AI's), the faster they go, the more data is evaluated, leading to "it'll take us humans years to figure out what we're seeing".
It's interesting that you posted this now, Lloyd. Not long ago, I would have told you that my cell phone use was pretty low. I used to just text for messages that needed to be sent: "What to pick up at the grocery store?", "Meet you at the cafe in an hour." etc.
But in the last few months I've discovered casual texting. When I'm riding the trolley or otherwise unoccupied, I'll scroll through my contacts on my phone and just send a hello to someone I haven't seen or heard from in a while. It's terrific! My social life has improved, and I'm doing more activities like hiking.
I'm a Luddite who bemoans new gadgetry, but sometimes improvements do happen.
I did a major cleanout of my contacts list last year, eliminating almost everyone. Perhaps that was a mistake!
"Perhaps that was a mistake!"
I would say yes, it was. In the early/mid-80, I worked for Digital Equipment Corp that had THOUSANDS of computers on a single network (unheard of at that time; not even IBM could do such). Part of the bonus is that we had the chance to "stress test" our own dogfood and much of the biz was run on VaxNotes (think forums of which CU! is one) and VTX (think websites). We were allowed to have personal SIG groups on systems that were local to locations in addition to the very technical sites supporting the various software sold to customers and personnel.
It turned out that was the beginning of online communities (and before the Web really got going). I made friends, close friends, all over the world.
And then DEC lost its way and that $12 Billion corp imploded; mostly because of no small amount of hubris and the lack of realizing that they were no longer a hardware company; they had become a software company that happened sell minicomputers (and disdained the "personal computers".
In 15 minutes, I lost all of my friends and the communities to which I was a part. Frankly, not just me but MANY of my former colleagues felt lost without the connection power of DECnet.
Get your contacts back, Lloyd, if you can.
I invested in friends who bought a PDP-11 to set up a social media venture in Toronto in the 70s. I had fun with that machine. (Lost my investment though)
VAXnotes/VTX combo or custom BBB type software?
50 years later, I have no idea
I love this!
I have a quibble with that chart: streaming music does not count as screen time, imho.
It is still making comparable ghg emissions.
That’s not what the chart is about.
It still matters though.
I think the screen time is a positive rather than a negative. Reading and agreeing/disagreeing with Lloyd Alter posts, socializing, keeping up with the news, mental exercise, accomplishing tasks, continued learning (and for us older folks, refreshing/recovering earlier learning)... Lloyd, I think you have this one wrong - break free from the group-think on this one.
An unrelated by-the-way. Any progress on you stopping flying - on stopping those aviation greenhouse gas emissions?
Screen time can be valuable. I worry about people becoming totally dependent on it, I see it in myself.
Not much progress on the flying, taking more big trips this year, but nothing planned for next year. You will not like my Wednesday post.
Thought-provoking!
I have three screens - iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.
MacBook is used for work (to me those hours don't count in the way Lloyd is writing about) but I also look at the online bike forum I check multiple times daily. And I do my financial tasks on the laptop.
The most time on the iPad is reading - just as Lloyd does, I use Libby and Kindle apps on the iPad. I also typically read the NYTimes at lunch on the iPad (I work at home so there's no one to socialize with)
The iPhone (which is the last of the three devices that I acquired, BTW) is used the least, because I mostly still use a land line (!) but it is definitely my communications on the go, text and email. People know not to call me on the cell phone :-)
So I actually don't think any of this is bad. I'm still early in my late life aging process (72) and ride a bike at least 5 days a week, so I've been lucky with my health and don't need DoorDash or Uber yet. I have benefitted from some TeleHealth Zooms vs. traveling to see medical providers. I read a lot, and still read some physical books, but I'm in two book groups and one is 19th century so I can get those books easily via Project Gutenberg. As an bike enthusiast living in a small place, I love having the online bike community to discuss things with, and I've met quite a number of these folks IRL as a result. Also, we buy and sell all sorts of obscure bike stuff that otherwise might end up binned, so there's some environmental plusses as well.
So am I screen addicted?
As a 79 year-old who bicycles about 3 miles a day (deactivated my greenhouse-gas-emitting car about 5 years ago) I think your screens (and my screens) are a positive rather than a negative.
I just looked at my phone stats for last week. My lowest phone use was 4hrs 22min. My highest was 8hrs 30min. I'd say 2 to 3 hours a day of that is reading substack. And easily 3 hours a day listening to podcasts. So not as bad as mindless scrolling or social media but not great either. Starting a few weeks ago i have started unsubscribing from one substack every day and deleting two posts from my feed that I want to read. Trying to tone it down! Online habits are like everything else. Easy to grow / hard to shrink! 😭
And I'm 61 so yeah , basically a senior 😬
61?! You’re practically a corpse! (Sincerely, 20-year-olds)
Yes! This is what people need: walkable communities, libraries, grocery stores, appropriate housing, and good neighbours.
All good, except for those seniors who live on rural properties. My cell phone allows me to contact friends and neighbours and order items online, which are still delivered to my door by Canada Post and other couriers. Prior to Covid, I would drive some distance each week. Texting is more convenient for everyone than phone calls...
Given the average life expectancy in the U.S. is 79 years, people in their sixties ARE considered “elderly”.
I am in your generation and share your concern about phones, and have shared with Katherine too. I dislike phones and other hand held devices, with the exception of e-readers, which let me carry a lot of books with no weight when travelling. At home, I will take the hard copy version from the library - and ride my class 1 e-bike to fetch them. The problem is social media. It can suck you in no matter your age. I do not do Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, BlueSky, or even Linked-In. YouTube still gets me if I am not careful, then I might miss the wild turkeys in the back field, or the squirrels eating mushrooms on my woodpile. The problem is that we are now forced to use apps, whether we like it or not. Airlines have done it to me. Now you have to use the app or you have to stand in line waiting for a human to show up. Apps are really about corporations not having to pay someone to help their customers, not to make the experience better for people. The big loss with cell phones is conversation with people. The best conversations happen, for all age ranges, when cell phones are not in the room.
Time to stop flying - stop those aviation greenhouse gas emissions.
True. I have tried, but the system that we have sometimes restricts our options. What a group of friends and I decided to do was set up a voluntary carbon tax fund at our church. We charge ourselves 50 cents a gallon for gas, and $0.02 cents a mile for airline flights. We then use to money to give to things like solar panels on Habitat for Humanity Houses, reducing their carbon footprint with our "guilt" money. I am personally not convinced that carbon offset funds do much good. It is better to invest in real reductions, like solar on rooftops and EVs, if you have to have a car, and electric bikes for short hauls. Nevertheless we still commit the "sin" of burning fossil fuels when there is not an available alternative.
Commendable (actually, VERY commendable!) - a voluntary association of like minded people willing to gather to mitigate something they see as a problem and directly channeling their talent / labor / private property to solve that problem.
All without getting government involved - a great example of what our Founders wanted in having an expansive Society (intentional capitalization) solving its own issues instead of pawning it off to others (e.g., govt). The "great buffer" between Govt and Individuals.
"I am personally not convinced that carbon offset funds do much good. "
It seems in your eyes, your "fund" is making the difference that y'all seem to believe is needed - and without the "vigorish" that govt and other third party "carbon offset fund entities" always take out of the funds.
Huzzah!
Lloyd won't like your advice as he's traveling more lately than I've seen in years.
More power to him showing the power of Modernity.
I’m getting old, I want to see things while I can.
Both VB and I used to say "more power to you" as you were ramping up (even as we pointed out the obvious dichotomy). One can have a personal philosophy but at times, it needs to be bent to meet actual needs.
Even though the price is contributing to increasingly unprecedented human suffering and death. Sad. An irresponsible response I did not expect from you.
I’m sorry Don.
Don't be, Lloyd.
As much as it seems that I may be on the opposite side most of the time, on this, it should be clear. People should be able to make their own choice even when castigated by a "purist" that brooks no dissent from the Narrative (in this case, a true believer berobed in Green preaching from the book of 1st Emissions).
The Freedom of Choice should reign over being forced to your knees for a perceived enviro-sin.
Yes, I couched that in religious terms - because I lived that growing up in the fundamentalist/LEGALISTIC (emphasis on the latter rather than the former) Swedish Baptist church whose Scriptures varied from Biblical principles by devolving to a highly detailed list of "DO THESE - and risk excommunication for DOING THESE OTHER THINGS (the latter included dancing - fill in your own other blanks) instead of the uplifting messages contained in the Gospels.
Snicker - keep flying, Lloyd but know that I'm still staying on top and computing your "hamburger penance" (heh!).
💚💚💚 #flyskam
Good points about social media. I also don't do the ones you listed, except that Instagram lets me see what my family members (particularly 30 year olds) are up to, and my local bike club uses Facebook to post events.
Thanks for the shout-out, Lloyd. Great article. Several grandparents have approached me lately to talk about their own screen addictions, which aligns with the Economist article you'd sent me. I'm glad you wrote about it, and maybe I'll dig into the topic, as well.
P.S. You're learning Japanese?! That's amazing!
I'm 60 and I don't own a cell phone. I do, however, spend a hell of a lot of time on my laptop and of course sitting in front of a screen at work. The screen time thing is an issue. And old people seem to be quite vulnerable to dropping down social media rabbit holes and ending up with weird and unpleasant beliefs. There's a real problem here that should get more noticed.
The second thesis in the article, about people in their homes, is really a completely different essay, and a much worse one. It gets an amazing amount wrong. Right from the get-go, advocating for old people to be warehoused instead of staying in their homes is horrible. But it gets most of the details wrong too.
So, first of all, it's talking about these services that elderly people use to stay in their homes as expensive. This misses the point; what's REALLY expensive is any seniors' living scheme that isn't totally awful. Even "kept in a tiny rabbit hutch and drugged so they don't leave their bed" is pretty blasted expensive, because generally run by profiteers. Anything better than that is prohibitive for an awful lot of people. Living in the home that one has already paid off so there's no mortgage or rent, is far cheaper. Even living there while paying for some home visits and stuff is cheaper. And talking about door dash is misleading. You don't have to order restaurant meals, most people just order groceries from the same place they'd be buying groceries anyway; the surcharge is small. Similarly, there's nothing about the decision to live at one's home for as long as possible that suddenly makes the "son-in-law with tools" (or, you know, daughter in law) disappear. But for people who don't have such a person, the ability to find a handyperson online could sure be a useful option.
And sure, having walkable neighborhoods and all that would be nice. But it seems like the article is blaming the victim here. What is the takeaway? As far as I can make out, it's "If we had walkable communities, libraries, grocery stores, appropriate housing, and good neighbours it would be OK for old people to live in their homes. But since we don't, rather than using whatever IS available to try to cope, their duty is to give in and get warehoused." Of course it looks bad once you spell it out like that . . . because IT IS BAD. It's a TERRIBLE position.
Meanwhile, none of that stuff would even help my dad. He's mostly blind and can't walk far. He can't navigate a walkable neighborhood. But he's fine in his house, which is a good thing because he's stubborn and wouldn't leave it. Being able to order his groceries online is a lifesaver (luckily his vision can handle screen stuff if the magnification is turned high enough). And as he gets a bit weaker, a bit of home care will really help. This is totally feasible; my dad is in the middle of what remains of the middle class, but he has very few expenses. And on the other hand, having to live in an unfamiliar place where his life is controlled by condescending young people who think because he's old he must be an idiot, would break him. So, does the author if this article think he should just shred his life because some of what's holding it together is online services and that should be a no-no?
Frankly, this isn't written like the author even knows any old people, let alone any they care about.
There's also a commercial push for us to use our phones as mobile cash machines on the grounds that if you give your phone all of your financial information, all you have to do is wave your phone and you can ride public transport, wave your phone and you can pay for that snack or even a full meal, wave your phone and you have movie tickets, etc. etc. You can even download ebooks from your library on to your phone.
So if you really have a problem with phone use and apps, how about how people will bcome dependent on AI. Much of the data AI uses is not correct or half truths. People will not do their own research. AI will give them the first answer, and look no further. That doesn't make it the right answer, don't trust it.
As far as Boomers being clueless and young people not affording housing, I see houses going up everywhere that are huge and the neighborhoods a full of cul de sacs. These aren't boomers. And I don't see a starter home. Our first house was 620 sqft with a basement, we bought it from a couple that lived there for 35 years and raised their family there. Homes today are moderately sized at 3,000 sqft, 5,000 sqft is big but not absurd. Of course you can't afford a house. Granite is ho-hum now. I remember when Formica was a big deal.
Here's a challenge write about something good.
An aside to "Much of the data AI uses is not correct or half truths."
It's called "hallucinating" (really!). It's a result of Large Language Models trying to integrate info from several different sources that may either be incorrect themselves (either Lefty or Righty biases when considering opinion pieces disguised as "news" or "information").
Or, as a number of lawyers have discovered, made up out of thin air when their briefs contain cases that never existed.
It's just like before - ALWAYS multi-check info from one site against several others. Ditto the new AI sites (pit one against the other).
But it's the expert. How can you question AI? Who are you? That's what the believers will say. Who checking to see what is going IN? Who is checking the development decision tree? Then AI creates it's own decision tree. I have a large background in Nuclear Power Safety. This would never be allowed. Does AI have the same danger as Nuclear Power? Absolutely. Does AI have the same need for national security measures as any defensive or offensive technology used or administered by the government? Absolutely. Can AI be hacked? Absolutely.
I would NEVER consider an LLM to be an "expert" having found known errors myself. It is just a tool that often is helpful - but one has to know, like with any other tool, its strengths and weaknesses. For sure, I would NEVER ask an AI to write ANYTHING for me - but it can scrape up facts that I know are out there but just can't remember where I read them (as one usage example).
And yes, I do question AI's by playing one off another. Heck, even the designers and engineers don't fully understand how the underlying neural networks are using the input tokens (weighted and parameterized) and then coming up with "answers", or hacking the input queries (either by front end chat users or engineering the LLMs on how to avoid certain lines of questions or demands - or provide query answers they know to be biased).
So yes, there are a number of ways that AI's can be hacked - through intentional training data bias as well as "engineering updates". And yes, I could classify their hallucinations as "self-hacking".
As far as Nuclear or Security usages are concerned, you have valid points. From AI's beginnings back in the 50s and 60s through to the end of the century, progress was more linear than anything else (and no, I didn't "play" in that area - just observed). In the last few years, however, it's exploded beyond, may I dare to say, our comprehension.
Think of that movie "Colossus: The Forbin Project" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id4SUleLLAA&t=6s). And non-technical people are yowling about shackling AI's with "safety brakes" now? When we don't know, after a critical size, how they do what they do?
The problem in knowing how they actually work has baffled human engineers and architects - they are just learning how to instrument them such that they can "see" (in small ways), how the neural nets are making decisions. However, the larger the LLM (or any of the other 15-20 kinds of large AI's), the faster they go, the more data is evaluated, leading to "it'll take us humans years to figure out what we're seeing".