by Sarah Firisen
I have a friend who is a travel agent. The days when we all talked on the phone to travel agents in order to book any travel are long gone. These days, for the most part, travel agents, the actual human ones, deal with business travel and high end travel for elites. My friend was telling me about being contacted by a client who was the high end elite type, at 3am, saying her email wasn’t working and could my friend text her their itinerary. Now putting aside the obnoxious behavior in expecting a reply from anyone at 3am, my first response was “doesn’t she use Tripit?” Or Google Trips, or even the airline mobile apps? At any given time, I can find all my travel details in all of those ways and sometimes others (business trips get automatically put in my Google calendar). Travel is so automated and online now, it’s amazing to me that anyone wouldn’t take advantage of these tools.
There’s a lot of hand wringing, actually maybe not enough, about automation taking jobs. But even before it has a serious impact on the labor market, it has changed a lot of other things. This Atlantic article points out that it already, and in fact for many years, has impacted how we interact with people who work at banks, stores, car parks. It’s impacted how those buildings are constructed in fact – these days, it’s rare to find a US bank that doesn’t have a large ATM foyer. I hadn’t thought about it until I read this article, but ATMs were some of the first large scale automations to really impact our day-to-day lives in a major way. Of course, these days I rarely use an ATM either; I don’t use a lot of cash and I deposit the rare check I get sent through my bank’s mobile app. Read more »