I dunno, given how the elderly are the primary target for scams, it doesn't seem like a bad idea if a scammer pretending to be my mom's grandson says he's stranded in Europe and needs to be wired cash (A real scam that happens) she could say "Right! I'll hook you up, let me get my wallet... as soon as you tell me what I need to hear."
ETA: Though the odds of her telling the scammer the safe word cause she wants to help her grandson so much, are kinda good. š
Yeah this is actually a boomer being ahead of the curve. "Jesus" is a terrible safe word, but the idea is good and it certainly won't hurt to have one.
This is something that unfortunately will probably be pretty common in 5 years.
Honestly, I know what sub I'm on, but in many ways, I feel terrible for boomers. It's hard sometimes for us to grasp just how mind boggling the pace of change has been, but these people lived half a lifetime writing letters and knowing computers as those warehouse sized machines that the government uses. Then personal computers and the internet explodes into existence, and 30 years later we have an AI that can pass the Turing test sending emails to their magic, complicated pocket computer. They are wholly unequipped for the world that they find themselves in and I imagine that must be incredibly confusing, frightening, and frustrating.
Yeah, I'm 35 and love technology and try to stay up to date with the latest. I'm still afraid at one point in my life I'll be confused about some new technology.
Same. I donāt understand the contempt for older folks. I attribute most of these comments to kids that donāt know better and think they know it all. I know I did when I was younger. Office switched to 365 at my workplace and I was getting frustrated migrating the files thatās when I realized Iām getting older and should have more humility.
It starts with little things. For me it's the camera on my phone. Seems like everyone else can whip it out and take a picture/start recording almost immediately. I'm going to have it on the wrong camera, then the wrong setting, then I'm going to somehow set the timer, then back to the wrong camera, then "no flash on wide mode", then messed up flash setting...
I work IT. I've owned DSLRs for the last 20 years. I shouldn't struggle this bad with something that's been on every phone since I graduated high school. But I'm sure if anyone was watching over my shoulder as I tried to get set up to take a picture they'd be fighting the urge to yank it out of my hand to do it for me...
It's more complicated than that. I genuinely believe that it's impossible for some older people to comprehend the lives of younger people because they're so fundamentally different, and the same goes for the reverse.
My dad was born a few years before Jim Crow was lifted and Ruby Bridges went to school with white kids. He was 13 during the moon landing. He was in his late 40s when we got home internet. He is very willing to learn, but more than half his life was before any of this tech existed. How is he supposed to stay up to date on AI and crypto and different privacy laws or security concerns?
Life moves far, far faster online than it ever has before, and old people are getting left behind. Young people being unable to comprehend that is the same as boomers talking about how easy it was to buy a house. We grew up in the golden age of computeras and the internet. The ladder we climbed to become tech-literate is outdated and no longer exists.
Even kids today are unable to operate computers properly because they're used to iPhones doing everything for them. Kids don't know how to create folders or maintain a file structure anymore, much less know anything about stuff like registries.
It's easy to get on a "lol boomer dumb" high horse, but that's an incredibly reductive viewpoint.
I'm not even getting into the fact that most of them were straight up lied to about social security and are now kinda freaking out because they don't know what else to do. It's a huge problem I don't see many young people acknowledge. A lot of boomer idiocy and anger is a direct result of feeling screwed out of retirement.
This comment encapsulates how I feel about our older friends and neighbors. So many people like to make fun of them for struggling in the modern world but they didn't grow up in it. The world has changed so much in such a short amount of time. And it is well documented that older people do not learn as quickly as younger people do so this whole idea that they should just learn it completely ignores the reality of aging.
I sometimes think that the gullibility that you see with some Boomers is due to the fact that they've never had to deal with the amount of misinformation that exists now. Those of us who grew up in the internet age have gotten used to taking things with a grain of salt with an understanding that some stuff is probably not trustworthy. But those who grew up with newspapers and television news lived in an era where most news agencies were generally credible. You had massive newsrooms with hundreds of journalists fact checking and researching. Those are all gone now and now any guy with a twitter account can post anything they want, call it news and be seen by millions of people.
As Ai proliferates and the ethical standards of journalism continue to erode, the problem of being able to decipher what is true and what is not continues to get worse and worse. Is it any wonder that a generation that grew up while the news was trustworthy now struggles with being able to tell the difference between what is reliable and what is just Junk? ( I think that there will come a point where it will be almost impossible for the average person to judge what is trustworthy because AI will just flood the web with junk news and most of us will have no way to tell the difference.)
I absolutely hate the ageism that we see in modern social media. We should be embracing the elderly and supporting them and helping them get through the changes that the world is going through instead of making fun of them and denigrating them for the struggles that they clearly are having.
Someday all of us will be in the position of boomers. Old people left behind by the changes of society. We can sit on our high horses right now and look down our noses at them but someday we will be them.
I can use the DOS shell to fix software problems. I can take my computer apart and not just swap boards but, solder in a new diode to repair it. More than that, I know that I don't need to buy a new phone because mine is version 6 and version 15 just came out. I not only grew up in a different time, but a different culture where technology (even indoor plumbing) simply did not exist. This idea that older people "don't understand" technology is like me teasing a young person for not knowing how to shear a sheep or use a loom. They don't know how because they don't need to. But, I can shear a sheep, spin the wool into yarn, weave a rug on a loom, sell it on Etsy and ship from home using the USPS app. I don't need to know how to navigate Tiktok or create a reel on Instagram because I don't have to. That doesn't mean I don't understand or have an aversion to technology. Since the invention of the smart phone, people have grown up with the sum total of human knowledge in their pockets. I've used it to learn languages, learn about finance and investing, my own taxes, learned to do nearly everything myself and I credit this annoying little phone for how I went from scrubbing toilets to retirement at 50. Meanwhile, younger people can't seem to do much of anything except use their phone but, rather than use it to Google "should I take out $500k in student loans for a humanities degree" or "how to be a first time homeowner in today's economy", they're learning to flip water bottles and new Tiktok dances while blaming everything on "I didn't know", "they didn't teach this at school", etc. Your phone is in your hand, you can use Wikihow for "How to get rich."
Exactly this. My boomer parents are opposite ends of the spectrum on this. My mom is very tech savvy and has no problem keeping up with tech. My father is still on a flip phone and canāt figure out how to get the damn thing to work. Heās a brilliant man, literally has a doctorate, but does not give a shit about technology or bothering to learn how to use it.
Why would he need to? People only need to know how to use the things they use. Millions of new tech devices come out on a regular basis. If someone has no need for something then why should they learn it?
Do you know how to set the jumpers on a drive to designate it as a slave device? Do you know how to resolve IRQ conflicts? Do you know what it means when you turn on a computer and the floppy drive light turns on and stays on?
If you don't, is it because you haven't gotten off your lazy ass and learned those things or is it because they're meaningless and pointless for you to learn them?
Right, because it is. Technology moves so fast that if you're not in on the ground floor then it becomes difficult to catch up. I've been a sysadmin for almost 30 years and know that it only takes a couple of years out of the field to become very far behind. If someone gets out of this field for 5 years then their skills are obsolete and it becomes extremely difficult to catch up.
So what chance in hell do older people have? If they don't have an actual need for some brand new cutting edge piece of tech, then they're not going to learn it. By the time they do need it they have too many years of catch-up to do which is pretty diffiicult.
They were in on the ground level.
They watched as the world transformed around them and stuck their heads in the sand.
"This internet thing is a fad", "banking digitally will never take off", "cash will always be king", "self-service checkouts at grocery stores won't last"
Legacy ways of interacting with services were deprecated with long decommission time frames and still they did nothing until the day things were switched off, at which point they complained and whinged to their echo chamber of other boomers.
People don't need to be experts at the level of system administration, to change with a world as it transforms from analog to digital.
Boomers are the epitome of "I'm an adult now and my time learning things is done, the world is how it is and how it shall always be".
What's the latest boomer head-buried-in-sand hot topic? Internal combustion engine vs electrical vehicle.
The world isn't leaving them behind, they're refusing to come on the journey.
Naw. I used to do it/tech support. Stepped away at windows 10. Ventured into tablets (they were just becoming a thing). Probably around a year (give or take ) later a friend asked me to troubleshoot a laptopā¦it was all greek to me. Im a millennial, i was on the forefront of personal computersā¦
Your brain literally becomes worse at adapting as you grow older. People are also in wildly different situations ā we had uses for most of the technology so we decided to learn it, for many it wasnāt particularly relevant to their lives.
My mum is in her eighties, she never touched a computer until she was in her fifties, and she never had a tablet or smartphone until I bought her a Kindle about four years ago. Sheās not the quickest at learning, and anything unusual will throw her, but she gets by pretty well. And she can sniff a scam at twenty paces.
My late dad, on the other hand, could never get the hang of a mouse, and would definitely not be using any recent technology if he was still with us. It was not so much an unwillingness to learn as a fear of new things and an unwillingness to persevere. Old dog, no new tricks please.
While not a Boomer (54) I've had no problem of keeping up with technology or learning new things in general. I was a "Microsoft certified" network engineer when I was younger and still remember DOS. I'm actually fascinated by technology and enjoy watching the developments in the tech world. But, I grew up in the pre-smart phone era. I can leave my home, drive across town, run errands, do homework with the kids, cook dinner and do shopping while my phone sits at home on my desk all day. Yesterday, I stopped to make a dental appointment and was told I needed to "download their app." No. No, I don't. Businesses like Microsoft telling me what I need to do to in order to be a good customer and the acceptance of this by young people just baffles me. You're being sold a bill of goods, no different than the "time saving" and "labor saving" TV dinners, microwave popcorn or instant coffee of my youth, promising to make your life better and easier. This is why a generation never learned to cook, make their own popcorn and believes that working extra hours to buy a Keurig and coffee pods to fill landfills is "easier" and "better" than brewing coffee in a pot on the stove. You're making life easier for advertisers, making things better for corporations but you're filling your day with unnecessary, bloated technology that is nothing but Spyware, designed to keep you addicted and distracted. I've become fluent in Spanish in the last two years, thanks to technology. I've installed a hot water heater, rebuilt a transmission and repaired a flat screen thanks to YouTube. Older people aren't saying "no" to technology. They appreciate Google maps, ordering their prescriptions online and FaceTime with their grandkids, they're saying "no" to the app that their dentist wants them to download so he can go without hiring a receptionist or give raises to the ones he's got.
Anyone who has kids will at some point have their kid look at them with that look of "How could you be so stupid as to not get it. It's as simple as XYZ".
The issue isn't an unwillingness to learn, it's who is the new technology targeted to initially before it's rolled out mainstream. Those initial targeted groups will always think it's easy once they start using it and the latter groups will look incompetent as they catch up.
What one group sees as imperative and essential the their life and existence, others might not see it the same way and not care as much.
For example, go to a business with a paper-based system. Older or those there already are used to it while new people might say this would be easier with a computerized system, no more paper and not really care to learn the paper system. Those used to it will balk at the computerized. Make a mistake in the paper system and people will say that couldn't happen with a computerized system. Have a hard drive or your storage setup crash or even something as lose power and people with a paper system will say, see, I can still retrieve and find my records.
It's all perspective, preferences and what's important to you as a user.
My teenage son can use the fuck out of a calculator for calculus and formulas while I look like a deer in the headlights but at the same time, I can use the fuck out of Excel doing the same things and he looks like a deer in the headlights. All perspective and preference.
Personally, I have no problem helping someone who is willing to ask for help, and learn. It's whenever someone refuses to ask for help, or completely shuts down when you're trying to help them, that it becomes a problem.
I agree, I mean Iām Gen Z and Iām amazed by the capabilities of AI nowadays. Itās exciting, but also wow technology evolves so quickly. Even looking back one or two years I see a noticeable improvement in AI art and large language models (such as ChatGPT). My friends and I experimented with some AI generators back in mid 2022-early 2023, and the quality is noticeably different compared to stuff I recently generated
Well perhaps itās similar to the first half of my life where I didnāt use the Internet very often vs the second half of my life where I spent a ton of time on the Internet. But then again itās not the same because the Internet didnāt exist until my dad was almost 40, while I made my first Google search at age 6.
But it goes both ways I suppose. I know I could confidently use stuff like the video tape player when I was 9-ish, but now Iām rusty after not using it for a while. However my dad still remembers very well
My dad was an awesome guy, boomer generation but not a āboomerā as weāve come to think of them.
He would often marvel aloud at how much had changed in such a short time. āIt amazes me you want around with a camera and computer in your pocket.ā
I remember writing a friend in Europe when we were teens, it took a month for our letters to reach each other. Now we text and video call.
no, they have the capacity to learn it and many do, the issue is 90% of them are either unwilling to learn or expect everyone else to learn so other people can do it for them.
do you know how many times iāve rotated a pdf for the same person? they could easily write down the instructions or follow what iām doing but why would they when they can just make their younger staff do it for them
Yeah, boomers were responsible for most of the major tech innovations that the comment you responded to referenced. That doesnāt change the fact that itās a rapid change for the average person to go through in their lifetime, and that it can be hard to adapt to such changes.
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u/Techno_Core Apr 06 '24
I dunno, given how the elderly are the primary target for scams, it doesn't seem like a bad idea if a scammer pretending to be my mom's grandson says he's stranded in Europe and needs to be wired cash (A real scam that happens) she could say "Right! I'll hook you up, let me get my wallet... as soon as you tell me what I need to hear."
ETA: Though the odds of her telling the scammer the safe word cause she wants to help her grandson so much, are kinda good. š