We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

The author argues that while modern AI assistants and user-friendly technology preserve computational knowledge, they eliminate the hard-won intimacy that came from struggling with difficult machines in the 1990s. This generation is uniquely positioned as "the last people who knew a machine the only way a machine was ever really known"—through difficulty and resistance—and will also be the last to consciously experience what has been lost as technology becomes effortless and opaque.