Technology reduces the value of old people

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/10/29/technology-reduces-the-value-of-old-people/

by soundsop • 17 years ago

52 58 17 years ago

blogs.law.harvard.edu

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.

bilbo0s2• 17 years ago

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 . . .'

sb2• 17 years ago

hi, just for the record: I know a lot of PHBs that do not even know Werner Vogels and would not even start contemplating hiring him seeing expected salary figures. One must never forget, that the common misconception that our business does not value experience comes from the fact that most software systems just have to be "good enough"--therefore, the old "worse is better" approach applies here, too. Consequently, the types of PHBs I have in mind would gladly hire the 25 year old for their euphemism software (product|system|whatever).

coliveira• 17 years ago

But in technology this happens not only with PBHs. Many startups are more interested in young people, even if they don't have all the necessary skills, because they can stay on the job 16h/day. While an experienced guy wouldn't do this. Also, startups don't have money to pay for talent, so unless you are a co-founder you won't get paid what you deserve.

Maro• 17 years ago

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

bilbo0s2• 17 years ago

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

jimbokun3• 17 years ago

Since there is so much emphasis here on technical things, go look at a Lisp Machine then we'll talk. Or what Engelbart did in 1968. It's common knowledge that industry practice is consistently a decade or more behind what is happening in computer science research. Anyone familiar with S-expressions for representing data was not at all surprised by JSON, as an arbitrary example, and might even know some of the pitfalls to avoid and how to best take advantage of this "new" technology.

Secondly, I'm surprised so many are taking at face value the value of Googling arbitrary facts. Without some context to put that information in, or to even know what to Google when you face a new problem, Google won't help you much. Ever take an "open book" exam? Did having the book with you do you much good if you didn't also study?

Lastly, an inherit premise of this whole discussion is that the primary value of a human being is his or her contribution to the gross domestic product. Is that really how we want to evaluate people?

mcantelon• 17 years ago

So how we can "innovate with" increasing the involvement in society of those with non-analytical, non-technical bents?

JCThoughtscream• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

... 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.

marze• 17 years ago

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.

eru• 17 years ago

Perhaps. Though in Germany they do have a health care system that does not disadvantage employers of older people like this. I don't if it's making much of a difference.

anamax• 17 years ago

> 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.

sb2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

rivo• 17 years ago

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.

rubinelli• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

evgen2• 17 years ago

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.

jrwoodruff• 17 years ago

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.

jcdreads• 17 years ago

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.

edw519• 17 years ago

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.

dangoldin• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

GiraffeNecktie2• 17 years ago

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.

alttab• 17 years ago

I echoed this on the blog but this was my response:

I agree with Gary. Not only relationships, but emotional maturity, and even more so now than ever HUMILITY… will only be learned with time.

I don’t think the value of old people has declined, as much as our appreciation for them.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

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. :(

jimbokun3• 17 years ago

"Thrift / self-sacrifice: There's less and less need for this, as we're immensely more wealthy than we used to be,"

I think this makes the argument for the financial wisdom of the old better than anything else you could say (assuming, of course, you're not "old" yourself).

EDIT: Ok, anyone want to argue that we were not in need of more thrift over the last decade?

GiraffeNecktie2• 17 years ago

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.

TrevorJ5• 17 years ago

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.

jerf3• 17 years ago

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.

TrevorJ5• 17 years ago

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.

TrevorJ5• 17 years ago

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.

rimantas• 17 years ago

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.

mechanical_fish2• 17 years ago

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

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".

raganwald3• 17 years ago

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_fish2• 17 years ago

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. ;)

jseliger• 17 years ago

<i>There are lots of unhappy people in the First World.</i>

Yeah. They should read Daniel Gilbert's book _Stumbling on Happiness_.

jamesbritt• 17 years ago

"We've always been big on the young: They're the ones with the most future, and it's all about the future!"

We've been big on the young since they became the largest demographic. As that shifts, so does the attention. I see far more products and services offered for the AARP crowd than I ever have.

10ren• 17 years ago

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.

clistctrl• 17 years ago

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.

jimbokun3• 17 years ago

I just remembered reading this:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2009-09-17-young-...

"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• 17 years ago

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 ?

huherto• 17 years ago

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.

raphar• 17 years ago

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

chubbard• 17 years ago

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.

evgen2• 17 years ago

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 :)

gcheong• 17 years ago

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).

Pistos2• 17 years ago

"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.

Mz• 17 years ago

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.

teeja• 17 years ago

"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'.

Technology reduces the value of old people

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