People were probably making “kids these days…” arguments with lots of hand wringing ten thousand years ago.

The lowest common denominator is pretty, well, low. The difference is that you get more exposure to it today than you would have in the past because you have more exposure to EVERYTHING today due to the greater means of communication available, and a relaxing of (or circumvention of) self-censoring in primary media channels. There have always been plenty of useless people.

I take the position almost opposite yours – I think that computers, simulations, and yes, even games, actually increase the drive to explore. Computer systems have a few key advantages for encouraging exploration of various kinds: They can be very high leverage, giving much more rewarding feedback for a given level of proficiency. This encourages people to begin the journey of being able to create things. They also allow creation of nearly arbitrarily vast works with effectively no capital investment. A free hand-me-down computer can be used to advance the state of the art in most fields of software.

The important thing is that good problem solving skills transcend specific applications. Orders of magnitude more people can become wizardly skilled in complex software fields than, say, classic rocket engineering could have ever supported. Some subset of these bright, skilled people will move to other fields, including rocket engineering.

In any case, complaining about other people really isn’t a high percentage move. Take responsibility for building the world you want, and start working on it. You may even inspire some kids.

John Carmack