Taking a photo of a check with our phone? This is the solution we've come up with?
— Bored Elon Musk (@BoredElonMusk) March 1, 2014
Based on past suggestions, I'm sure this fictionalized version of Musk would suggest brain implants that let us think our money to another person. But really, he does have a point that this isn't the optimal solution.
In the past I've complained about technological solutions that don't think through the implications of their own innovations. For example, suggesting that you could replace conventional mail with with mail that is sent electronically, then printed out and delivered to the recipient. Well, there is a related flaw, one demonstrated in the picture-cheque complaint: using technology to get around an existing problem, instead of removing the thing that caused the flaw. It's like people who spend hours on the phone while driving: if you can communicate with anyone, anytime, why the need to travel so much? And if we can move money around purely electronically, and everyone has a device they can use to do all the things that used to require a bank branch, then why bother with physical cheques at all?
I thought of this today as news went around that Facebook and Apple would pay female employees to freeze their eggs so they can work for those tech companies without giving up on having children. Yes, in a world where we have the ability to make work incredibly flexible, we instead use technology to rearrange our lives so that we can stick with the old fashioned way of working.
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