Task

Do you think older people find new technology harder to use than young people do? That's the usual assumption, though I'd question it slightly. What older people often lack isn't the ability but the exposure — younger users have simply failed at more interfaces and learned that nothing breaks. Where I'd agree is that most software is designed by people in their twenties and tested on people like themselves, so the difficulty may be built into the product rather than into the user. Should schools teach children how to use technology responsibly? I'd say they have very little choice. Children are online long before anyone formally teaches them anything about it, so the question isn't whether they learn but who from. The difficulty is that responsible use isn't really a subject — it's judgement, and judgement is much harder to timetable than a set of rules about passwords. How might technology change the way we work in the next twenty years? It's genuinely hard to predict, but I'd expect the change to be less dramatic than people assume. Most previous waves removed particular tasks rather than whole jobs, and what tended to happen was that the role reshaped itself around whatever the machine couldn't do. If that pattern holds, the jobs that survive best will be the ones where the difficult part is dealing with other people rather than processing information.