Experience or trust – which will count most in the future?

In a recent blog on Instructions I made the point that experience counts for very little when the world around you changes. Cars used to be easy because experience teaches you how a car should look and how to drive it. But when something about that changes all your experience can actually end up being a bad thing. You get stuck.

So what’s it going to be like in the future when ‘they’ will do it all for you. How will your experience be of use when you have no idea how things work anymore?

 

In this case I am talking about driverless cars. Like this cute little thing below.

Or if you’d prefer to see how it works for yourself:

Actually experience might not be too helpful when the car in question simply has a go/stop button and presumably a way to tell the car where to go. Now I’m sure it’s only coincidental that if you search for errors in Google Maps, the top item is, of course, how you can report a problem. Now call me old fashioned but as you head towards the cliff edge, trying to report the problem to Google isn’t going to be the top priority.

Finding the brake and the steering wheel might be – after all that’s what experience teaches you to do. In this car you don’t have either of those things.

And I do need to make the point that it is not just Google that is creating driverless technology. Its just their car looks cute. All car manufacturers (this from Volvo) are developing various aspects of this technology and some of it is already available. And there is a lot more to come.

Which bring us back to the problem of experience being over-taken by technology. I know, I’m sounding like a Luddite. Which actually isn’t the point. I love technology and am probably a marketing person’s dream. I have wifi this, iPad that, and simply can’t get enough of where technology is going to take us. But I am also at the point where I am now going to have to rely on others to make things work and actually park my experience in the garage where it will sit gradually fading into history.

That sounded a bit melodramatic but it was fun to write.

So I find myself at a crossroads. A crossroads where from here someone else will do the driving. Experience can no longer be relied on to get me where I want to go. I need to rely on others, not only to have an instruction manual, but to have actually read it. I need to trust in ‘they’, and believe me that doesn’t come easy to people of my generation.

Trust is going to have a come back or I am going nowhere.

When it comes to technology what would you trust, and what wouldn’t you?