It's commonplace for older generations to criticize the young. In my early career, an older fellow told me he wouldn't hire anyone who didn't know how to use a slide rule. Another only a decade older than me said he only wanted to work with people who had built their own crystal radio or some equivalent.

You might as well have told me to use an abacus. Sure, all those things are cool, but not indicative of competence. A calculator doesn't make someone less intelligent. The definition of intelligence, and certainly competence, changes. I am regarded as intelligent but really I just have a great memory and a way with metaphors. I can break problems into manageable blocks and sort the blocks to make progress. Someone who doesn't read and remember everything today isn't less intelligent, they may just be a different kind of intelligent.(1) In a nearly-infinite universe of information available, finding what is important is intelligent.

The fact is, Gen Z isn't dumber than in the past, they are probably both smarter and more intelligent than we were, and the generations before me.

For example, when I turned 18, crystals were best-selling wellness tools and fake Hitler Diaries had sold to a newspaper for $4 million. Yes, journalists and editors who believed they were critical thinkers and smarter than readers paid a fortune for something even I assumed was fake, and I was from a town of 200 people with no bars, five churches, and one stop sign. Today's young people were raised on "Wreck It Ralph" so they know "hippie dippie baloney" when they see it. The people running the world when I was 18 didn't.

The people claiming they were smarter than those my age believed banana peels contained a psychoactive substance named "bananadine." It was so popular in cities like (naturally) San Francisco the FDA announced they were looking into its hallucinogenic effects, even though the whole thing was clearly a hoax.




The Detroit Sun, 1967. Link: The Double Blind psychedelic magazine.

They even believed in magic. When President Obama was elected in 2008, I was concerned about him floating the idea of anti-science crackpot Robert F. Kennedy running EPA, sure, but just as concerned that his circle of advisors was stuffed with UFO believers, government conspiracy proponents, and a guy who thought girls couldn't do math. Yet when you look at their ages and political proclivities, none of their beliefs were a real shock. Obama himself said he wanted to investigate if vaccines caused autism, because a giant chunk of his political party thought that. Much like they had believe in smoking bananas 40 years earlier.

Even Superman was susceptible to magic, because his creative team was.

Since it is Halloween season, here is a cover where Lois Lane is mind controlled by Euphor, a villain who is powered by negative emotions and whose draining of those emotions leaves his donors in a state of bliss. She becomes The Witch of Metropolis and since she has magic, she can beat Superman - in a skirt and heels!


Thank you Cary Bates and Curt Swan and you too, Gil Kane, for that cover, I can still recognize your work from four decades and a mile away. All rights controlled by Warner Bros., low-resolution used to honor Fair Use, I look forward to the James Gunn Superman movie, please don't sue me.

Given what I know about the irrational beliefs of the people in charge when I was 18, I suppose I should be nicer to those who believe organic food doesn't use pesticides now. They still overwhelmingly dominate places like San Francisco, Berkeley, and the rest of the U.S. west coast.

I won't be, though. It's 2024, anyone literate should know better by now, especially the country's wealthiest and most educated.

Now I wonder, and maybe you can help answer, what will be the strange archaic metric for Gen Z to determine the worth of future employees? Coding in Python? Let's hope not.

NOTE:

(1) For my Halloween short story for friends and family this year, I asked the Artspace,ai online tool to create a cover graphic. Since I am not experienced with AI, I used normal human language because I know what a cover art piece needs to look like; "Create a blonde witch on a motorcycle in a desert and include her entire hat in the picture"

This is what it gave me.



Looking at this, I am not worried about AI taking over, most of this can't be found in our part of the Multiverse. The developer of the tool may note I am just using it wrong, I don't 'know' how to specify inputs, and Stable Diffusion or MS Image Creator are just more 'dummy proof' and Arspace.ai is much better, but you shouldn't spend money on the thing when 'free' from other tools is probably better for what you need. That makes me more intelligent, not less because I don't know the jargon of a tool claiming it makes for less work.