As though this was some kind of revelation, the news is trying to tell us that we’re all getting older with every day. A few days ago an Associated Press writer found it necessary to point out that half the people in the United States were not yet born when Sen. Joe Biden first arrived in Washington in 1973.

A couple of days before, Beloit College in Wisconsin listed all the things that incoming freshmen had never lived without, such as GPS, caller ID and Nintendo Game Boys.

The point of the list is to remind professors that a lot of stuff familiar to adults of more of less mature age — Watergate, for instance, or even the Beatles — were parts of ancient history of which their students were only dimly aware if they had heard of them at all.

Well, for the rest of us, the effect is only to remind us how fast time is moving along, faster with every passing year. But it also reminds us of something else: Much of industrial or technological development of recent decades, to say nothing of changes in music or entertainment, is of dubious merit. It drives the economy, which may be good enough, but it doesn’t do much to enhance the human condition.

Today everybody seemingly needs a GPS system to find his way to the store. So all those college freshmen at Beloit and everywhere else have to wonder how their grandparents survived without satellite navigation.

You have noticed that everybody under a certain age has plugs in his ear. Plugs? No, earphones, and the wearers are listening to something. If you want to talk to them you have to tap them on the shoulder.

E-mail is probably the best example of backward progress. The volume of communication has increased a hundred times, yet nobody can demonstrate that people know more, or that the world generally is better off, than before there was such a thing.

The things technology provides get old and break, so we have to replace them now and then. But often the new ones don’t work any better, and now and then they cause more trouble than they prevent.

The cell phone is obviously handy when you get into trouble on the road and have a call a tow truck or AAA. But when so many drivers in traffic are talking on the phone instead of paying attention, you have to wonder what civilization has gained even if they don’t cause many accidents.

What possible good, for example, has come from the ability of people to take pictures with cameras hidden in phones or computers? That sort of thing is a gimmick. Once we’ve made it easy to take picture surreptitiously, we should not be surprised when surreptitious images lead to trouble, as some Albany teenagers have just begun to find out.

Sure, progress is a good thing in many other respects, especially in the greater acceptance of the variety among human beings.

But while half of Americans living today may not have been around when Joe Biden first went to Congress, it is worth recalling that those who were around did not exactly live in caves or have to hunt and gather for their daily meals.

The D-H editor, acutely aware of the accelerating passage of time, can be reached by e-mail at hhering@dhonline.com.