Elon Musk is going to end me

We have all marvelled at the advances made in technology and scientific breakthroughs. Most of us will have seen at least a handful of dystopian films about the end of humanity as we know it as the robots rise to power. Our screens and media in all forms are predictably full of alarm, after all – nothing grabs attention quite as well as fear.

Mr Musk or let’s just call him Mr X, a reductionist term that he appears to enjoy. It is hard to ignore the fact that he aspires to be a rival for a Bond villain with his odd sense of over importance and world domination. Anyway, Mr X thinks that financial advisers need to be worried about the threat of AI. There are many in my field who agree.

I am mindful of not wanting to take the Kodak approach to life, ignoring the rapid changes in consumer demands as technology improves and changes the landscape. Indeed I welcome it, from improvements to efficient data gathering and report writing, to better and clearer understanding of issues and options. To reduced operating costs and greater transparency. I am all in favour.

So am I to believe that a series of prompts from a cyborg will replace me? Well I suspect that s/he will be better looking, be able to perform some tasks much more quickly, but in terms of time spent with you and for you, that remains to be seen. I struggle to believe that empathy is little more than coding.

I am not fool enough to believe that change is not coming (some is already here) but I would like to remind you of some basic truths that, despite our enormous advances in technology, continue to frustrate and make life worse rather than better.

I wonder if you have tried to pay for a parking permit with a London Borough lately?  Or attempted to get the NHS appointment system to operate?  Tried to call a telecom company to discuss the problems with your line or change an error on your pre-flight check-in? To have had your mobile phone lost or locked and successfully restored all your data and applications, especially the authenticator. To book tickets online for an event in the milliseconds after they go on sale or simply try to check your National Insurance number when your surname or suffix has altered and are shocked to realise that you do not exist, perhaps we are living in the Matrix after all. Perhaps you have an old-style pension with an old-style pension company and you simply cannot obtain the right information, or you are an employee trying to retire and your employer’s pension scheme administration is, well… stuck in what seems to resemble something out of spoof BBC series from the 1980s Allo, Allo.

The commonality with these examples is that they are instances where technology has been deployed and is utterly hopeless – and they are all very common experiences. Your call definitely is not as important as you are being told, otherwise someone senior would have done something about it. As for the virtual assistants on most banking sites, well forgive me if I scream and wish for the mortal failure of swathes of the Banking sector. Yet these are all rather straightforward instances where simple technology really ought to be delivering the changes promised by the Consultants that sold them for multimillion sums, yet fail every single day.

The basics of scheduling, such as a routine, repeat order (anything from pet medication to your wine club) really should not be quite so hard to amend. A refund from the DVLA who collect your road tax each month from your bank account by direct debit yet insist on sending an oversized cheque that your banking app cannot cope with, so you have the joys of finding a local branch of your bank to deposit it the ‘old-fashioned way’. Perhaps that train ticket that you bought online is wrong and it’s too onerous to change or you now struggle with touch screens due to a medical condition that you cannot even book a ticket without joining the queue at the ticket desk now operated by someone who clearly thinks that online capability means there is now no requirement for the excesses of any human interaction.

When Amazon manage to master packaging an item into an appropriately sized box or when the next DPD driver asks if you are over 18 and if you could provide your date of birth (why?). When your washing machine, fridge, doorbell, health tech all are savvy enough to appreciate that you really couldn’t care less if they have finished their task and can dispense with the notification of the mundane. When the weather forecast is right or indeed the economic one, or a politician says what they mean rather than what they believe you want to hear.

I imagine that you assume that we use technology here at Solomon’s, and that we do so with thought and regard. I know it isn’t perfect and we all get fed up repeating some of the exercises. I also assume that you want to speak to a human who can help you grapple with sometimes dull, sometimes painful, sometimes stressful, sometimes embarrassing (really?) and sometimes joyful elements of helping you figure out how to make the most of your time and money and the relationship between them.

Whilst I do agree technology offers the possibility of enormous benefits, I respectfully remain unconvinced that either utopia or dystopia are arriving anytime soon.