Can You be Replaced by Robots?

Every time I swipe my own card at the checkout I can't help but remember the 'good old days" when I would hand the plastic over and the checker would do the hard work. They might even smile and engage in conversation.

I don't like scanning and bagging my own things, but add some RFID tags, and a 'Fastrak' style credit card in my pocket, add in the autosort, autobag feature and what do I need the checker for? Maybe I could view a Max Headroom style monitor to make me feel like someone cares about my experience... That could certainly minimize the risk of a checker having a bad day, negatively affecting the customer satisfaction scores.

Is this what we want? ...........................Not me.

I want a well trained, attentive, customer service professional to handle my transaction...............And I'm willing to pay for it.

But, think about it.... 10 years from now what jobs WON'T exist? Forbes had an interesting article a little while back that may still provoke some thought. Some of their predictions may be a little out of whack.

I think the video store clerk might want to have a "plan B". But that's the easy one to figure out.

What else? .......and better yet: What are the upcoming opportunities and how will we be taking part?

The Technical Lie

For years our kids could not figure out why we would LIE to them when they would ask us what time it was.

They would ask the time, we would look at a digital clock that might read 8:13, and we would claim that it was 8:15..... If it was 8:11, we might claim it as 10 after 8. They never said a word about it, for many years.

They just quietly pondered this obvious deception and wondered what our motive might be.

Somewhere along the way we realized that we grew up telling time on analog (dial) clocks and our kids learned to simply read the digits on the display of a digital clock. No need for approximation, just read!

We all had a good howl over this when we figured out what was going on. Our poor confused kids must have thought we were trying to pull a fast one!

What made me think of this is that I was referring to a call going "right to the machine" instead of: "right to voicemail". Well, we haven't had a "machine" answering our calls for quite a while. We don't even "Dial" a number, but the lingo has lingered.

I don't make a Xerox of anything, but there might be some that still do.

Some may say they video "taped" something, but maybe it went to disk or hard drive with no tape involved!

I wonder how long we will Google, or Blog, or use our Blackberries.

I heard an older speaker (not that old, either) refer to the laptop and projector as the "typewriter"... (Yikes!).

I'm amazed how many people don't apply new technologies. I guess it takes us quite a while to dislodge the old methods, including some of the language.

Web Influencers

Business Week's top 25 Web Influencers .... to influence the web, is to influence more than the web. What are you influencing? ...are you thinking "outside the web?"