The current panic says AI is making people worse at thinking. Maybe. But if you want to know why so many younger workers are fluent with apps and so shaky with computers, AI is not the first place to look. The deeper break happened earlier, when schools and institutions decided that students should interact with managed appliances instead of actual machines, like Millennials did.
Older computer literacy was usually learned through friction, and fucking blue screens. Learned through pirating music, cracking videogames, downloading viruses, trying to make windows to work... Install something and break something else. Move files into the wrong place, never find them again. Delete Window's system files and acting surprised when it broke. Fight with permissions. Recover a lost document. Get a printer working by trial and error. None of that felt educational at the time, but it forced users to build a picture of the machine as a system with layers, failure states, and places where a problem might actually live.
Enter, the Chromebook
The Chromebook era cut a lot of that away. It was designed to be easy. In the United States, Chromebooks became the dominant K-12 device category during the 2010s, more or less out of Google heavily marketing them towards schools, and heavily subsidizing them. From an administrator's point of view, the trade is easy to understand since they're cheap, safe devices. Easier fleet management. Safer deployment. Harder for students to break. From the student's point of view, they're good enough for Instagram, Youtube and the likes. Not for learning computers, but great for surfing. Great for Google. Files barely matter. Installs barely happen. Permissions are hidden. System-level troubleshooting belongs to somebody else. The computer stops feeling like a system you can poke at and starts feeling like a locked interface you are supposed to navigate correctly. If you thought Macs are easy, then you'd be shocked at a Chromebook. They sell for $100 to $200. The hardware is MORE expensive than that. As always, as reminder that when you can't see the product a company sells, you're the product. Google doesn't give thee for free. They train kids to be web-oriented, not computer-savvy.
That is why the digital native myth always sounded false to anyone who has watched people use computers under stress. A person can be fast inside working apps and still have almost no system fluency. He can move through apps but have no idea where the file actually lives, why the login is failing on one machine and not another, or what to try when a tool stops cooperating outside the happy path. I have watched this show up at work in very ordinary ways: people who are perfectly competent inside polished SaaS tools but freeze when they have to find a log file, compress a folder properly, troubleshoot a local setup issue, or reason about where a permission failure is happening. I see this in Gen-Z coworkers A LOT.
So is AI at fault?
Fuck no. AI sucks, but it's not at fault for this. It's been here for like a year (usefully). Chromebooks are to blame. They made it easy and now kids don't know what a computer really is. Fuck google. Yes, I get the marketing "we wanted every kid to have a computer" but they clearly forgot the "computer" part when designing the chromebooks. Why couldn't they put a Windows OS on them? Why that stupid flavour of Android on a COMPUTER?
