Why are most old people so utterly incompetent when it comes to learning how to use computers or smartphones?

Why are most old people so utterly incompetent when it comes to learning how to use computers or smartphones?

Is it their fault or are humans truly unable to learn new environments when they're old?

Is the same thing going to happen to us?

>is the same thing going to happen to us

In the over-customized world we live, it looks like the old people of today aren't as bad as our current gen will be- who grew up fidgeting with their UI. No objective thinking just, "wah, I want it to be prettty."

>psst! Grandson! I want to show you something.
>What is it, grandpa?
>Check out this rice, my dude. You damn kids and your augmented reality headsets will never know the struggle of editing a config file meticulously until your wm is just right. All you kids--you kids! You think you can just swap out your digitally rendered, three-dimensional waifus at the wave of a hand. When I was your age, we had these things called wallpapers, and you had to EARN your waifu by scouring the internet until you came upon the right image, and you stood by your choice. I stood by my waifu. I loved her. I cared for her.
>Granpaw, what's a wai--
>Bah! You kids will never understand. Forget it. Go and do your erotic play with your sister. Make sure you ream her real good in the asshole, Billy.
>Okay, grandpa

We'll be fine, but kids that are just growing up now? They don't know anything about how their phones work, and they don't care. They're just as incompetent as old people are today - they're just used to how their phones work now. In forty years they'll be struggling with whatever we have then.

>Implying anyone on this board will reproduce

The same reason you are so incompetent with cars, OP. I bet you wouldn't even know how to change a belt by the side of the road.

Every non-fag man over 60 can do this with ease.

>with ease
>2017

None of those men have the slightest idea about maintaining a modern car full of electronics and with an engine compacted to absurd levels.

i hate those damn electronic belts

>Show elderly neighbor how to do >something easy
>They write down every single step to the smallest detail
>They call me up later
>"The menu is different, I don't know how to do it"
>Or better yet "it doesn't work"
>Yes it does, you just can't figure out how to keep the mouse stationary when your right click
It's like these people can't even reason or bother to understand any little bit about technologies that they use every day.

>Is it their fault or are humans truly unable to learn new environments when they're old?

It's about what they're used to, which isn't computers. Most old people are just that used to doing things the old way, because they've been doing it that way for their entire life.

There's also the part where computers suddenly are getting more and more mandatory to have and understand. Think about it, having a computer in the 80s was only for enthusiasts, in the 90s it was either voodoo 3dfx mustard race or specific office use, and only in the 00s did computers actually become mainstream, and even then they weren't that mandatory yet. Now where halfway through the 10s and look how much changed already. Computers are no longer an option but a requirement, and everyone is expecting you to have some kind of smartphone.

They get thrown into a situation they've never dealt with before, and getting shit forced on you like that on an old age is quite irritating, to say the least.

Television literally rotted an entire generation's brains. Your parents and grandparents have long since been zombified.

This describes most people with everything technological.

Cars first came out, a few enthusiasts got them. They learned all they could about them. Then they became cheaper and easier to use. Normies dont know how they work nor do they care.

TVs first came out, a few enthusiasts got them. They learned all they could about them. Then they became cheaper and easier to use. Normies dont know how they work nor do they care.

Computers first came out, ...

The internet first came out, ...

Smart phones first came out, ...

Its the way things are man.

There is a saying that goes something like "Things that exists before you were born will seem boring and mundane. Things that come about before you're 20 will seem new and exciting. Things that are invented after will be strange and confusing."

most young people suck at computers too

Hopefully most of us are smart enough not to.

>wwwaoo grandpa how can i be as kewl as you, you truly broadened my horizons and what is this arch i686 on your camputor

Never reply to me ever again.

Good goy

Well ones ability to adept and learn new things does grow weaker as you get older, but I think more important than that is simply willingness. As you get older you have had your ways set for a long time and it will be hard to see a reason to change that. Hell I already feel somewhat like that.

This, tbqh senpai. I have 23 years in the industry as developer and operations. Installing a driver or getting your raspi to blip doesn't mean shit, kid.

This, people in general are pretty technologically handicapped. It also does become more difficult to absorb new information as you get older.

I think this is the reason.

>spend my entire childhood/teen years making fun of older people for not knowing how to use computers
>spend my early/mid 20s making fun of older people for not knowing how to use smartphones
>now in late 20s
>children and teenagers know how to code
>programming makes zero fucking sense to me

old computers and software were terrible

my dad had to work with monocrome dos 8086s with bugger all training back in the 80s

shit burned him for life

hates technology

computers sucked before ubiquitous internet. shit even installing early debian back in the early 2000's at my holiday house without
dial up almost broke me

I'm still amazed that practically no one over ~50 can figure out how to change the input source on their own fucking TV, although in their defense it was never really standardized and some companies make it unnecessarily confusing.

My parents use PCs and iPads and android phones with relative ease but they still can't understand how to switch the TV input to their Chromecast so they never use it unless I do it for them. I've shown them countless times. It's basically because they have to use the original TV remote rather than the universal one for the PVR which can't change the input source. But yeah, that will probably be me in 30 years. feelsbadman.

*blocks your belt*

Cars follow Apple logic now senpai

>Windows/Linux management or knowledge mean shit when it comes to programming

I actually always wondered about this. Continue on please.

Those who like tech shit will like it for life.

My father was into ham radio heathkit shit in the 50s and 60s, and has followed technology ever since. I was rewiring model trains in grade school and have followed a similar path.

All of my other non-engineer relatives could give a shit. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, they don't want to program anything, they just want things to work.

By the way, these are exactly the same people who wouldn't even think to shorten the chain with a running toilet, or would fix a leaky disposable cup by pouring the contents into another.

>By the way, these are exactly the same people who wouldn't even think to shorten the chain with a running toilet, or would fix a leaky disposable cup by pouring the contents into another.

i think you accident some words

My point exactly. Sigh.

Soo, cucking?

Lots of old people (engineers) past retirement age on my job. They're using all the latest tech, have smart homes, etc.

I believe this

My grandpa got very decent at operating his PC, to the point I'm not afraid of telling him to download/install stuff. The guy isn't even that technologically minded or anything, worked 40+ years as a refrigerator repairman.
It all comes down to how willing are you to integrate new information. Most old people aren't incapable of learning to use a computer, they just don't want to adapt. By the extremely conservative/reactionary (not politically) attitudes expressed around here, my guess is that most Sup Forums users of this era will grow up to be even worse.

The year will be 2070
Sup Forums fags will be in the final stages of their life surrounded by little cyberphant brats that they raised to capacity.
They will all be using their state of the art Windows V.R pods to learn programming, physics and maths to increase their IQ to 150 by age 10.

Sup Forums will be sitting in fron of their AMD athlon asking themselves how the damn quantumn internet explorer works.
Their kids will sigh and connect via neural network in a flash making the machine light up as it plays anime music while moving the mouse with their mind to show you.

>You will never know the joys of having tiny ghosts in their shells.

;-;

Everything will be owned by Amazon and Google, every other company and even government has been bought by the only two gods the universe will ever have. They own everyone but a few free software fighters that will die of old age sooner or later. The rest of the world doesn't even know they're slaves to their masters

That'd be 2030, not 2070.

Now that I think about it... You're probably right. I don't like this version of the future.

However, unlike all other technologies - the simple driving device, propagande machines and advertisement machines - personal computers are meta-machines. Therefore, superficial knowledge about them is crucial.

>trump supporters have no plasticity

You realize we did it for the lulz, right?

it's already happening

But all of these things also became more advanced

>cars in the 50s
Any mechanic could learn the inner workings of a car

>cars 2017
You need an MSc just to be able to understand how the butt warmer functions

I explicitly said "not politically" you outrage-for-hire retard.

>implying he said trump
>implying anyone outside of Sup Forums is a trump supporter

>overboard insulting
>while criticizing reactionary behavior

Whew, lad.

>spend your whole life getting good at stuff
>the world rapidly changes so much that everything you were once good at is now an obsolete relic
>all these smug kids think they're so damn smart and they got all these fancy tools that make them not have to suffer through the same laborious bullshit you had to
>feel stupid and helpless, and it seems like they are always sighing and rolling your eyes because you are only now learning the terminology and procedures that they have grown up memorizing
>you come from a generation that was taught that wisdom inherently comes with age but now it seems like it is literally the exact opposite.

don't resent your elders for not knowing stuff. they taught you how to wipe your own ass

They will be known as the last of the wizards...their rebellion echoing out for years to come. Then one day... a small boy who decided to explore the "real world" will stumble upon a decrepid apartment, he will saunter past the old books and linux magazines and find the skeleton...triumphant...lying upon his Asuka daikamura, on the screen, radiating like a light of hope in a dark and forboden world, Gentoo...
The boy decides to move the mouse, he has never known such freedom before...
and so the new wizards rise...like a phoenix from the cold ashes of death, a new life...
A Gnu life.

>needless greentexting
>using reddit spacing
>using reddit meme ("wew lad")
>being offended by criticism of reactionism (typical Sup Forums-/r/Sup Forums political position)

>appending a mean word to an argument is overboard
Just the kind of response that you'd expect from a reactionary, baka.

Made me think of this greentext. These are the guerrilla fights of coming generations against the oppression of the ruling forces!

>reddit spacing
>people have been posting like this since the early 2000s

fuck off newfag

everything else is on point though

Legit cried, thanks user.

>typical Sup Forums-/r/Sup Forums political position
It'd be more accurate to say "typical Sup Forums-/r/Sup Forums political self-label".

>Triumphantly on an Asuka Daikamura

>Asuka

Disgusting pleb.

Also fuck you I was drinking milk.

My dad was in to ham radio (not building, just got his operator license) and also got me into tech. He can still troubleshoot shit but anything past setting up a home reciever etc is still beyond him. I think you're right; wherever you're at by 20-30 is where you stay

Nah it'll be more like this:

"lol wow grandpa you still use a keyboard?? Why can't you just think the words into the computer? It's so easy! We learned to do this in kindergarten, watch you just put this on your head and BAM you're thinking words into the computer - see, it's so easy why do you insist on using a keyboard lol?"

"You goddamn brats and your fancy gadgets, I could type faster than you little snot-noses could think a coherent sentence if I wanted to. You can't even type 120 words per minute on a keyboard like I can. You don't even know what the difference between a cherry red and cherry blue mechanical switch are. You kids think you're so smart, but really you don't know anything. HARUMPH"

You could always just start learning?

Knowing how to code is like knowing how to speak french. You learn the syntax, you learn the grammar, you make logical connections and bam, you're coding shit.

Your problem is that you're looking at a finished product and wondering how in the everloving fuck you make that. When you need to break it down and look at the building blocks that make it simple.

You're a brat.

chill out, grandpa. No one is saying you are stupid.

these guys get it

the problem is that most people (including but by no means limited to old people) hate thinking. They actively do not want to learn. They want someone else to fix shit for them so that they never have to put their brain in gear for any reason, and so if they instructions the tech guy gives them doesn't work, what do they do? Do they go back through them to see if they made a mistake? Do they poke around in the menus or settings looking for an option that seems related to what they want to do? Do they google an error message? No. Too much work. They bitch at the tech guy for not making it effortless and mindless. It's learned helplessness on steroids, because they actively want to be helpless.

probably has something to do with that, though the masses have always had a streak of this problem in them. And its compounded by the fact that so much television is a level below mindless bullshit, as is almost all of youtube.

Programming is a Untermenge of development. Can you even?

What i'm saying is that kids don't know shit today either, they just think they do because they remember a few screenshots.

Obviously exceptions exist, but we are talking about the smug arselickers that think because they can install a gamepatch they are wise.

But what if those smug assholes actually put time and effort into learning Lua?

Wisdom != technical expertise.
People learn to make good decisions with age either that or they fuck up incredibly.

I dunno about that. It's more like Boomers are just stupid and lazy.

A few years before she died my grandmother got a PC built out of spare parts from my uncle to encourage her to use the internet. She took to that thing like a fish to water and was always using it to look things up online (usually stuff like weather or recipes) or play card/board games online. She was always a bright woman, though. She just needed to be encouraged to try new things.

On the other hand my aunt (a boomer) is nearly 20 years younger than my grandmother was and always wants the latest tech gadgets but can barely use any of them. She still can't deal with an android set-top box despite being taught and re-taught countless times by the same uncle. It's dead simple and even set up with her universal remote she already uses for the TV And cable box. The situation is so bad that she that will actually still rent movies through the cable company that she already has in Kodi.

>KIDZ ROOL OLD PEOPLE DROOL!!!1

You do understand 98% of the technology you are using was designed by people your grand fathers age. Shit networking, protocols and such, hasn't changed much since the 90s early 00s -- most people are using Gigabit cards or/and WPA encrypted Wi-Fi.

>Gigabit still the fastest commonly available
>Ethernet technology has not advanced in nearly 20 years

Its already happening to me. Kids and their Snapchat and Yes Queens or whatever I don't get any of it.

This is how I hope my crypto investments will end up in 20 years, making me filthy fucking rich

It is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowing and knowing what to do with what you know.

Speaking of old people. Can anyone recommend a mouse that has good resistance on the buttons? My dad's twitchy because of medication and is always accidentally clicking shit.

There's not a demand outside of enterprise environments yet.
Your WAN connection probably doesn't exceed 100mbps, and basically any other task outside of file transfer isn't going to fill a 1Gbps pipe.

10G is pretty common in the enterprise world for backhaul and SAN connections, but again, your average user isn't going to exceed much more than an average of like 20mbps.

I... I'm fucking 22 and I feel like I have the same problem. I don't know, it feels like UI designs these days is dumbed down to the normie level that it gets somewhat counter-intuitive for advanced users like us to work with it.

This sort of thing didn't happen 10 years ago.

No, it really is as stupid as it seems to put a touchscreen UI on a mouse-and-keyboard PC.

Shit, faster-than-10G stuff is appearing quick in enterprise/datacenter settings. 100G is on the horizon.

But even 10G will take a long time to leak down into the consumer space. I think it'll finally happen when enterprises are so thoroughly 10G that the price of 10G chipsets drops through the floor because every server has it. That's how 1G got down to the consumer level, enterprises bought lots of it and the price came down that it showed up on consumer equipment because eh, why not, it's not even any extra money to make it 1G.

most accurate post in Sup Forums so far.

Yeah, we have 40G links in the works (government IT so everything takes 3x longer). Also 10G is a lot harder to do than 1G.
99.7% of users won't ever come close to saturating their 1Gb connection, so the demand isn't there.

If you wanna do 10G stuff at home, you can grab a SFP+ switch off of ebay for a half decent price and fs.com sells modules for like $15.

A frame is still a frame, packet a packet, and a segment a segment. Heck even with the advent of Gigabit+ networking we're still using 1500 MTU.

What advancements have been made? Faster NICs, higher bandwidth? The paradigm remains the same, I suppose beauty of open standards.

It'd be nice if some improvements could be made to take advantage of new found speeds, end-to-end encryption as a standard for all protocols, and standard way to authenticate all network devcies -- IE: no-rogue devices on network (switch+router) without your pre-approval, there's 802.1x but . . .

True. My grandfather had that engineer mindset, and knew his way around Unix-like operating systems better than I do - he started computing before GUIs even existed, so his knowledge went deep.

Meanwhile, his wife and kids have an embarrassingly poor knowledge of technology - my dad could barely manage to program a VCR.

It just comes down to a willingness to learn. Shit, even someone with a well-below-average IQ could learn the rudiments of programming or computer hardware if they had the patience to learn.

It's a bullshit excuse to claim a lack of neuroplasticity etc. - it's laziness, stubbornness and a desire not to be embarrassed by their lack of knowledge that stops people from learning about technology.

no, tech is only getting easier and easier. that's the only evolution nowadays fisher-price touch screen UIs

People just don't want to learn. Even with computers as prevalent as they are to do, most people in their 20's have no idea how they work. I don't expect every single person to be able to do advanced shit with their hardware, but it is appalling to me that people can spend so much time with their devices yet have no idea about how any of it works. How the fuck do these people spend thousands of dollars on electronics and have absolutely no understanding of the hardware that makes it work? They do absolutely no research whatsoever, and then when it doesn't work like they think it should or it actually breaks they spend hundreds of dollars to fix it rather than take the 15 minutes to fix it themselves by FUCKING GOOGLING THE PROBLEM. A friend of mine was complaining about how her laptop was broken and it was going to take the repair place a week to fix it if she brought it in. I fixed that fucker on the spot in 10 minutes by just googling the fucking issue. People have all of this information at their fingertips and are completely blind to it.

>Is the same thing going to happen to us?
Yes, there are plenty of old people who worked with computers in the 70's also that laugh at you for being a dumbass now

You do know that people like explained her do think the same about you and they are usually over 60

>Why are most old people so utterly incompetent when it comes to learning how to use computers or smartphones?
Have you not realized it's the same for literally 80% of people who use those devices?

These old people were part of the generation that were taught from birth that learning is a bad thing. They've been conditioned to work as industrial drones, to which the ability to learn is discouraged as they might learn how fucking ruined they are.

It's more like.
>insert insult about grandpa not having botnet in his mind.
>grandpa grabs a ak and runs innawoods while kids head blows up from violation of think crime.

Programming has been around for longer than you have been alive.
>Wtf there are people younger than me that can do brain surgery
No shit they took a different path than you
The topic of this thread is general tech usage required of daily life

Just write an AHK script that requires the mouse button to be held down for x ms before it sends a click command.

because when you've seen lisp recreated a few times you know you don't have to learn anything new, just keep watchin the youngsters spinning their wheels, being exploited while simultaneously making chads billionaires.

Why are most people so utterly incompetent when it comes to learning how to use computers or smartphones?

Is it their fault or are humans truly unable to learn computer autism?

Is the same thing going to happen to us? No.

It's not all older people, just the ones of the mindset that they can't learn anything new. "I don't understand it immediately so I will never understand it" Plenty of 20-somethings are like this, just grew up with computers so are able to use them.

There's also the argument that they can get it to do 99% of what they want to do and for the other 1% of the time the kids/grandkids will sort it so why waste what precious time they have left learning something when not doing so will get the family over more often.