My parents and I have an extremely strained relationship, or did when I saw them regularly. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but that's a different post. I have a theory about this, though -- generational gaps have been huge over the last ~100 years (when the concept of generations started to crop up, gen x, gen y, Boomers, etc). Part of this is technology -- my greatgrandparents were children before WW1, my grandparents were Boomers who listened to the radio for entertainment, my parents can remember the advent of color TV to an extent, and I, of course, have the internet. This makes it easy to trace the gaps in simple terms through time. Such differences in lifestyle make it extremely easy to dismiss an older (or younger) relative -- I might think my parents are naive about certain things, and they might thing I don't spend my time effectively. This comes down to not having a shared framework of past experience. This is a problem exacerbated by technology -- but as the first generation to truly be "comfortable" with technology grows older and has children, perhaps the problem will vanish. (Or perhaps, of course, the technologies will grow with us and we will no longer have that shared experience platform to stand on with our children. Who knows.) EDIT: mk summed up what I was trying to say. And hopefully we have. Or maybe we're just deluding ourselves.So perhaps [previous generations] didn't adopt technological adaptation as a life-skill.
I try to think of technology that will someday out match me. So far in life I have been able to adapt, but one day the technology will become useless to me or even worse I will be unable to use it. The technology gap is wide, but I've noticed it is wider between the newer generation and the middle aged then the new and the old old generations. This has been true for thousands of years, but I honestly expected it to change as soon as technology started to exponentially grow.
I've often joked that someday my grandchildren will spend their time moving their hands through empty space in complicated patterns that I cannot understand. Every once in a while, they will smile or snicker, and I won't have a clue. However, my hope is that adaptation might be a part of my generation and those younger than me. As you note, the baby-boomer generation seems to be on the other side of the gap. However, during their formative years, technological advance was relatively slow-paced. So perhaps they didn't adopt technological adaptation as a life-skill. That said, you might be right about the changing speed of advance. We might be more able to adapt to new technology than the boomers, but the rate of change might be something that we can't manage. Still, there has to be a human limit to the rate at which one can adapt, and therein lies the premise for singularity.