Despite being the venerable age of forty six I regularly work with children and the teachers who herd them. Most of these teachers with born in the 1990s, some in this century and have little to no conception of the world before computers.
I was born in 1978 and the computer was a magical mystical thing that was used by the Government and mega corporations like ICI (google it). You saw them in television and films performing amazing feats but if you ever did come across one it was regularly disappointing. Like the original Ai chatbots. The scientist who was showing it off knew the extra ordinary power of the machine and what it was doing but pong didn’t do it for me.
In the pre-computer age we still played games. These used our imagination to animate toys and dolls to living things with their own lives, desires and ambitions. I think that this is why the Chucky films are powerful. The inanimate, animated by thought and then going off on its own sweet way. The same is true of our own dark dreams about Ai and maybe they are equally valid.
In the pre-computer age we were far more social. Not on the Tube, that was always a very anti-social place. We talked in pubs, we had family meals and visited our friends. All of these have been suppressed by the modern computer age. Even cinema which Orwell considered deeply anti-social has suffered from the streaming era.
Finally in the pre-computer age the world was a much smaller place and we got to know it intimately. Again this was already under attack in the 1960s with the growth of cars and television but the ghost of the pre-technological world was there. The local pub was frequented with a relationship with the Landlord, nodding acquaintances with the other regulars, the playing field was a haunt of the local children and local traditions were remembered more.
The world is a very different place to the place where I grew up without computers. Do I miss it, yes. Would I want it for my child, definitely and do the advantages of the modern age outweigh the past, I don’t think so. I think it is just another way of living.