Let’s start with a story. Just a few years ago, when I first turned to think seriously about the changes wrought by 40 years of the computer revolution, I found myself in a meeting with some senior figures in cybertechnology: directors of computer labs, explorers of artificial intelligence, people with their fingers on the pulse, or maybe the throat, of the future.

In the chit-chat before the meeting began, I mentioned a British study claiming that “many young adults spend a third of their waking lives” on electronic devices. These young people, ages 16 to 22, check their phones an average of 85 times a day — even while they already have their devices set to beep or vibrate to notify them when they have a new message.

In response, one of those senior technology sophisticates I was sitting beside, a director of a computer lab, said this study might as well have been done with his own children. His kids constantly consult their phones and tablets, he said. Like smokers who have to sneak out for a cigarette in the middle of a meal, they can’t even make it through a restaurant dinner without withdrawing from conversation to look for messages. They even get grumpy, he said, if someone tries to stop them.

You know just what he meant. Other recent studies have pointed out that people in constant electronic communication become disturbed, set off-kilter, when cut off from their computerized contact. They display small signs of irritability, anxiety, confusion, and even existential dread: a general feeling of unfocused threat and displacement. These are, I pointed out, the classic symptoms of the psychological category of disease known as addiction. Those kids are addicted to their electronic devices.

Then, the computer-lab director, one of the masters of our future, said something that struck me as both profound and telling about where we are culturally at this moment. Here he was: a significant figure with weight behind his opinions, a man presumably trained by graduate school to thoughtful articulation. When I suggested that his children were displaying the classic symptoms of addiction, he answered, “So what?” In other words, so what if kids are addicted to this useful technology? What difference does it make? Why should anyone spend the least division of an hour worrying about such stuff?

There are, of course, several ways we could take this. Perhaps he was just being morally obtuse and didn’t particularly care about his children — although that seems unlikely. Or perhaps he was just looking for a way to close down the conversation, though it did, in fact, go on for a while, until the actual meeting finally started and the person running it glared us all into silence.