Earlier this month I took part in the Milton Keynes self-driving car trial, for a forthcoming article for Computer Weekly. Sitting in a car that steers its own wheel was enormous fun. However, it was striking that those I spoke to for the article thought that fully driverless cars on public roads are a long way off. Such technology is generally better-suited to making operators more productive rather than replacing them.
There is something of an obsession within tech for eliminating people completely, whether drivers or customer service staff. But with the latter, where the process has gone a lot further, the result is often frustrated rather than delighted customers, and the same is likely to be true of any process that involves human users – which is most of them. As Izabella Kaminska argues in the FT’s Alphaville blog, among many other drawbacks, properly driverless taxis would quickly end up twice as filthy as night buses at dawn with no-one to supervise them.
I am currently working on Ovum’s annual healthcare IT trends report. The prospects for replacing healthcare professionals with IT look minimal – leaving aside everything else, how can a computer care? But there are lots of ways in which technology can make such professionals more productive. In healthcare and other industries, better productivity would be a more productive focus for IT than eliminating people entirely.
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