[ExI] The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 7:14 AM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

snip
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> BillK, a friend is trying to teach his daughter to drive.  She is in her mid 20s.

Interesting.  I taught my kids (and their friends) how to drive when
they could barely reach the petals.

My shop was walking distance, so the car sat in the driveway most of
the time.  Many years later I found that the kids would drive it
around the block and take great pains to park it exactly where it had
been.

> Having a very difficult time of it, so he hired a professional drivers education trainer to work with her one on one.  The trainer had some most interesting comments, a guy who has been doing this for a living for 36 years. > He commented that there was a sudden and mysterious change that happened over about 5 years.  He struggled to understand why his students came to him with so very little intuition for how a car works and how traffic works.  They had to be taught the basics, stuff that 20 years ago all of them just knew.  Now, a lot of students come in for first-time driver training when they are older, plenty of them in their 20s, whereas before they were almost all teenagers.
>
> Any ideas about why drivers in training were suddenly clueless?
>
> OK the trainer speculated that as soon as video games and phones came along, kids growing up being driven around by their parents stopped paying attention to how the driver was operating the car.  They had better things to do.  So... they reached driving age and had no idea what to do.

As a thought, what is needed is a driving video game.  Make it the
only thing they can play while being driven around.

Keith

> spike
>
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