Robin does stuff

Recently, I had a long conversation with my mother and grandmother about how hard it is to use new technologies to change and/or better the way non-tech people work. When someone has worked as a clerk for thirty years, he or she won’t accept a new, digital, system being put in to place which alters the way work has been done. I wonder how this problem will evolve as our generation and the ones that come after that will have jobs and find ourselves confused by new technologies.

A pessimist will ask: How much more will the nature of what we do with computers and networks change? In the 1960s computers were used for, well, computing, nowadays they are used primarily as a means of communcication. Will the difference between now and the 2050s be as massive as that shift? If the revolution of the last decade evens out, we won’t have to worry about learning new technologies, because there won’t be anything radically new. Yes, the core technology itself might possibly not bring anything radically new, but the effect of the inventions of the last decades will only be felt when we figure out what cool stuff we can do with those.

When these new applications arrive when my generation is going on fifty, will the basics of networking and digital communication that Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs and others are teaching us now be enough to face these evolutions? We are growing up with applications that are constantly evolving and hardware that is and will be for the forseeable future getting faster and faster. Is that enough to make us more flexible when we become old grumpy farts? I’d like to think so, but I might be biased. As someone who is young and interested in these things, I have no trouble whatsoever adapting to new technologies and I find a certain delight in being ‘bleeding edge’.

I don’t believe hostility towards new things in general lies at the core of adaptation of new technology, but rather the unwillingness to learn new things. When we get older we can’t be bothered to learn new things. We are tired, leave us be. It is the industry’s task to minimize the learning process of a new technology. The UI has to be intuitonal and self explanatory not only on the surface but also in settings and uses that are more advanced. This can be done by introducing intuitonal multi-touch gestures in screens (or other places) or replacing keyboard and mouse by pen on screen like in Microsoft’s Courrier tablet among other things. Certainly, the replacement of the WIMP-model is imminent and necessary.

If new technologies are presented in an intuitive way, we don’t have to worry about adapting when we are old and rusty. Granted, this would only solve the problem of not wanting to adapt because it is too hard. There are other reasons too: new technology is expensive to implement and some people gathered a certain power gaming the system. The first problem might be solved by cloud computing or software as a service but the second problem can’t be solved by implementing new technology and has to be (if at all possible) approached in some other way.