Recently I had the pleasure of visiting one of our industries roadside facilities – commonly known as a transport café in the old days, though we appear to be going American these days and calling them Diners.
Oh well, I digress a little. It was whilst there I happened to overhear a conversation on the table behind between three gents that judging by the topics could only be LGV drivers.
They seemed to be having a shared grievance of young transport managers that in their opinion knew nothing about doing the job and had never driven a truck load.
The conversation turned to vehicles and one of them mentioned how recently he’d been taken into the office to discuss his weekly driving standards.
Sounds familiar to you guys? Yeah me too. Well apparently he’s good but needs to cut his idling down, he didn’t say idling, the actual quote was “I’m letting it tick over too much and wasting company money”. He proceeded to say my car does stop start, so why can’t trucks do it and if my truck did it I wouldn’t have been dragged into the office. I thought; well they do, just turn the key.
This set me off thinking; we have seen massive changes in technology over the past years within our industry and society. Yes, some of it has been around for a while in different guises but over the past six years we have seen massive improvements and development within advanced systems and I don’t suppose it will stop.
Are we too dependent on it? Today, it is claimed that every other person owns a device or gadget that he or she carries which is technically advanced; even the humble diary is electronic and it would appear our friends and colleagues are lost without their phone.
Is today’s technology a positive advancement? It appears to be taking over our society and industry, from our children to the big corporate world. Sure, we need to embrace innovation to move on and aid us with the challenges and needs that are thrown at us in our working or private life, but at what cost?
Could we go back to our old ways of working if our new systems crash? Could the younger generation who the three guys refer to organise a daily or weekly work load the old-fashioned way using pen and paper and maps? Or is the cost of the introduction of this new technology the loss of the very life skills we were taught?
What was it Albert Einstein said: “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots”.
Technology is vital in today’s world – you have to keep up with it to try and stay ahead. It can make life that much easier, there are those that will state it makes people lazier. Not necessarily so: smarter I think is the word they are looking for…
