If you had told me ten years ago that I'd be walking around with a cell phone that was also a computer, a camera, an iPod, a calculator, GPS, a timer, etc. I would have laughed. The iPhone was inconceivable to me, although now it's just a part of life.
Technology changes our lives every day.
I read a terrific piece by Mark Herrmann Why Driverless Cars Will Wreck Your Legal Practice and I thought wow, what a thought-provoking article. Driverless cars are now being tested. We may soon live in a world where drivers are not needed. How will this change the world?
Do you teach at a driving instruction school? Work for the government in a driver’s license department? These careers may soon go the way of the sundial, the high-wheeled bicycle, and the instruction manual to the computer you used six months ago.
If you are an attorney and your practice centers on auto accident litigation cases, you may need to think about diversifying.
A couple of years ago I thought it was important to get a GPS, because I have a tendency to get lost a lot -- even in a parking garage once, which my children found hilarious -- and so I got a GPS. I was never really comfortable with it.
Now I use the GPS on my phone. It's easy to use, and I never worry about getting lost any more.
My son lives in a world now where everyone has a GPS and nobody knows how to go anywhere without it. He referred to I-85 yesterday as "that big road that goes up to the mall."
How will a world of driverless cars be? Taxi drivers and chauffeurs will be out of a job.
My mother has a friend who went to college in the 1940's to be a writer -- for radio. The invention of television saw an end to that career, or at least a drastic change to it.
Technology changes our lives every day.
This is the part of Herrmann's article I found most interesting:
You’re in for a breathtaking change. Many families now own more than one car, to satisfy the needs of two working spouses and a teenager or two. When a single car can drop one person off at work, and then drive home to drop off the next person, and then shuttle the kids to school and after-school events, and then pick up the parents at the end of the day, demand for cars may plummet. One car may provide ample transportation for not just one family, but several.
So it behooves everyone with a small business to pay attention to technology. We must adapt in order to survive, as Darwin famously said.
However, I don't think of this as a bad thing. Maybe one day there will be a profession called Instructor for New Technology -- a person who comes to your home once a month and tells you how to use all the new stuff that's just out.
I hope one day my son has that job, and I get a family discount...