Comment by 59percentmore
1 month ago
I don't know that that's an accurate description of the circumstances in the books. They were born into a world of ever-present and almost-ubiquitous connectivity, and heavily encouraged to string together modular black boxes to build new things. This didn't make them prodigies, it just kept them from falling behind. They lived in a world where even the physical shape of their schools wasn't stable and reliable.
When you compare to kids learning from home during the pandemic, on Chromebooks and iPads, building TikTok videos with CapCut instead of an actual local NLE application... you can start to hear the echoes.
The book clearly and repeatedly makes the point that immersion in ubiquitous computing made the younger generation smarter and quicker than their forebears. Miri was 13 and Juan was, what, 9? Both were depicted as running rings around the older generation, even those who weren't taken out of action like Robert.
The form and maybe even the content of electronics in school may echo, sure, but the results sure don't.
No, it doesn't, and no, they weren't. They were depicted as more comfortable and capable with the technology that they'd never known a world without. Some adults weren't able to keep up, but some (most) were. If children had really become fundamentally smarter, the hierarchy of authority would have been upended, and it clearly wasn't. Miri still had to mostly listen to her parents.