So I was once again lamenting the relationship between politicians and technology. The most out of touch and technologically illiterate members of our society have all the power to regulate and govern the technologies that they rarely understand. Technology has fundamentally shaped our society, and the rapid pace of progress has meant that the ground has been shifting constantly. There's a lot of opportunity for the government to leverage tech, but any thinking along those lines is just a pipe dream as long as the people in power still aren't sure why the internet is a big deal. Just looking at the political landscape, a lot of the policies being pushed are mired in old ways of thinking, assuming that everything that was true from the postwar era through about 1990 is still true and will be true forever.

That lead me to wondering - it's generally known that old people and technology don't mix. But is that a feature of all old people, or just boomers and older? Millennials are characterized as having early exposure to technology and being more adept at it, and Gen Z was born into a society that already had widespread internet. Are those groups going to also lose technical literacy as they age, or have they been inoculated by the rapid progress they've experienced their whole lives? With political power shifting from the Boomers to Gen X over the next couple decades, should we expect them to become just as illiterate as they get older, or is there hope that politicians might be able to create policies for the world that we're in instead of the world that we had thirty years ago?

What about me? Am I going lose the ability to keep up as I get older? Will I know if I do? Has it already started?

It's impossible to get hard data to answer these questions since there aren't any Millenials in their twilight years yet, and no previous generation has experienced such rapid technological progress before. So I wanted to see if any of you had any thoughts on this. Is the correlation between age and technological illiteracy a feature of humanity, or just of previous generations?