GoKawiilHighly scientific chart I drew showing the difference between an infinite exponential chart (which leads to the AI singularity) and a sigmoidal chart, which levels out at some unknown point in the future.
When I was a kid, I would get off the bus at my friend’s house so that we could sit right next to each other on the couch and watch each other play Pokemon on our Game Boy Colors, until we were forcibly separated because I had to go home for dinner.
We still cut the grass and did our homework. In the summer, we went on long hikes and camping trips away from the Game Boys. But the entire time, we were talking or thinking about Pokemon, or whatever other video game or piece of cutting-edge technology we were interested in at the time.
I remember a vague disgust this behavior elicited from our parents, and also how they had basically no way of stopping us. They and their parents had grown up in a time before all this. They had personally watched the entire world transformed before their eyes by post-war technological advancements. It made a lot of the Boomers rich beyond belief, and it had granted them, and by proxy their parents who had lived through the Depression, the ability to give their children everything they never could have afforded, and so much more. Even though they were annoyed that we were looking at the stupid Game Boy and talking about the stupid Game Boy practically all the time, they still felt, somehow, like they owed this to us.
I remember that I had a Gateway desktop computer. I pulled it apart and discovered an extra couple of slots for more RAM. With the help of the local computer repair guy, I brought my bedroom’s computer up to a whopping 768 megabytes of RAM. That was still relatively modest even for the time, but since I couldn’t afford the multi-thousand-dollar gaming computers, it at least was enough, I knew, to play Call of Duty. So the next time my mom took me to the mall, I got the boxed CD-ROM, and on the way home I read the back of the box and the entire manual, and recited passages of it to my mother like it was Whitman.
Then, one day my stepdad came into my room and told me we had just gotten high-speed internet. He got it to connect all the high-tech security cameras at the convenience store we owned, which was, helpfully, just a short walk across our front yard. Suddenly, I could play the even newer Call of Duty 2 online with strangers from all around the world. I did that so much I would dream about it every night and one time had an anxiety attack about my kill/death ratio (really).
I remember also that I had a GameCube, and I tore open all the little flaps at the bottom and saw ethernet ports, plug-ins they had included for potential online games in the future. This was a magical promise to me. I dreamed of being able to play Animal Crossing with my cousins who now lived far away. These sorts of dreams of non-local hyperconnectivity were getting better and more possible all the time. It felt like it was all headed somewhere better than merely here: to the stars or virtual reality or downloading ourselves into a computer. That stuff was more inarticulate than it is now, but it was certainly there. That was what was so exciting about technology, and particularly video games: it was always getting closer and closer to simulating a better reality. As the dreams of these video game developers shaped our minds and our aspirations, we wanted nothing more than better graphics, better connectivity, more realism, faster physics engines.
What I’m describing is what it was like to grow up in America in my age group. To buy a PlayStation 5 these days (and notably it’s mostly people my age still playing these types of video games) would be a sad imitation of the excitement of possibility we felt back then. That’s not to say people don’t continue to play lots and lots of video games. But something has been lost about that exciting frontier that was unfurling in front of us back then. Kids now don’t play Game Boys and dream of Pokemon being made real. They don’t look forward to the next newest thing in the same way we did. They’re just handed an iPad and go slack-jawed, for the most part, watching other kids play video games for them.
There is some saturation happening, we must notice. We’re bored by promises of better technology and now looking elsewhere. We’ve gotten pretty much all we can consume. We’re informationally obese and looking to go on a diet. Millennial parents are more likely to restrict their kids’ access to technology. The more they understand the technology, the more likely they are to restrict it. They’re understandably horrified by the now clearly negative effects of it, how it’s making kids depressed and anxious and unable to be in the world. Kids today aren’t like we were, forced to spend time away from already limited technology, out in the woods, seeing the real thing while fantasizing about the fake thing. Now it’s all fake things, all the time. Parents can hardly help it, because they are also caught up in being entertained by all the fake things they are now too afraid of the real world to send their kids off into it. But the important change is that now at least we want to want it to stop.
My wife and I were discussing this on the couch the other night, talking about our future kids. For us, it seems obvious in a way that just wasn’t to Boomer and Gen X parents that we wouldn’t just hand our kids the latest technology. This seemed to have shifted around 2020 (with a sad, lost generation of young Gen Zs who had the full blast of the best technology and none of the restrictions). It’s also interesting how disinterested in better technology we’ve become ourselves. She joked about seeing an Apple Watch on sale for $200 and briefly feeling a pang of excitement, like she was a child again and might get herself something good for Christmas. Then she realized: what would she even want with an Apple Watch? She already hates her phone. Why would she put it on her wrist so people can text her even more often? We even have “bricking” software installed on our phones to make them inaccessible and dumber in certain ways.
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