Comment by K0balt
It’s truly remarkable to me that in the late 70s/early 80s it was considered that programming your own computer in basic was not something that required special skills or technical ability.
It just goes to show how far out expectations have dropped, with basic human ingenuity and capability for expression having been crippled by reliance on increasingly advanced automation with increasingly simple interfaces.
Humanity is not going to fare well in the world of pervasive synthetic intelligence with simple language interfaces. I fear we will see an unprecedented dumbing down of the population, a new “dark age” perhaps.
> It just goes to show how far out expectations have dropped
Those computers were vastly simpler, and many weren't connected to any kind of external network (or the networks were, again, vastly simpler). It's like the difference between a Model T era car (many people possess the technical ability to maintain them, even today) versus a modern car.
It's not that we expect less of people today, we've just produced something much more complex so what it even means to understand or use a computer has changed, because it's not the same thing as 40-50 years ago. If I threw an Apple II level computer at someone today, I'd expect as much from them as throwing the same computer at someone in 1980 (actually more, they'd have more foundational knowledge than a random person in 1980 would have).