Road XS transport software takes away all the mundane tasks so you can better serve your customers. But what is transport software, (and software in general) aided by technology, doing to our brans?…
Just remember a time briefly before sat-nav. You would get a map out and plan your journey. You’d measure out how long you’d think the journey would take and if you hit traffic, well you hit traffic – it was one of driving’s great unknowns and you just relied on the radio. You might think we’ll even plan a stop here on our route and if it’s a long journey we might even take a night somewhere just to stay alert.
Fast-forward to today, you know almost exactly what time you’re getting somewhere because real-time traffic is programmed in, your exact location is known and even if you miss a turn your sat-nav will take you home and find the most optimal route. Not only does the sat-nav know where you’re going, but your car is surrounded with software and will even link to your mobile phone software. Heck, if the car gets you lost, you’ll always have Google maps to hand on your GPS phone. If you think about it, a sat-nav is a form of transport software and is used within fleet management systems throughout the world supporting delivery for services such as DPD and Amazon.
All good stuff – and it definitely makes the life of the emergency services a lot easier finding people as well as keeping friends and family informed of where you are.
The technology however is changing the way we think and process information. Some argue that sat-navs are ruining our capacity to think whilst others argue that actually it gives us greater capacity to focus on dangers around us as we drive. Others argue it actually offers them comfort to know that they know exactly where they are and how far they are from places. Is your fuel low? No problem, your closest petrol station is 2 miles away. Comforting…
With London cab drivers, the part of our brain that stores mental images of space is actually a lot larger. The more experienced the cab driver the larger this part of the brain is. In sat-navs, (sadly they don’t get bigger the more we use them) the code underpinning them and the mapping engines just get longer and better equipped to handle instructions.
1997….that’s when Google hit the scene. That’s certainly when I first heard about it as a clever little answer box. It was almost fun just seeing what it could answer and more fun seeing if the teachers could work out if it was my intelligence or Google’s in an essay. Google is the ultimate leading software search algorithm. The software underpinning Google has created industries as a result and provided employment all across the world.
Google and the Internet in general is changing the way we think. So, whilst we might be getting ‘smarter’ with access to quick information and answers, we are actually reducing our ability to concentrate as we seek our next hit of dopamine. Even a small level of use from Google, varies patterns in our brain.
Google has taught us to skim read search results to see which answer best suits our needs. This has translated into how we then skim read books, the information does not ‘go in’ as we seek to scan information.
However there are benefits to using Google. The areas of the brain responsible for decision- making are triggered, meaning that whilst Google might be making us ‘stupid’ it is actually assisting in keeping our minds sharper, especially as we get older.
With more than two billion people around the world with a smartphone, we now have Google in our pocket and, coupled with the smartphone, it’s changing the way we do things in our day to day life. Research now suggests that smartphones are causing real damage to our minds and relationships, measurable in seconds shaved off the average attention span, reduced brain power, declines in work-life balance and hours less of family time.
Smartphones have impaired our ability to remember. They make it more difficult to daydream and think creatively and more worrying, smartphones make us more vulnerable to anxiety. They make parents ignore their children. And they are addictive, if not in the contested clinical sense than for all intents and purposes.
The one thing under-pinning the smartphone however is the software. The app. All making our lives easier by supplementing mundane tasks and speeding our lives up.
If you factor in the explosion of social media, in the likes of Facebook and Twitter in the last 10 years, you can see how society has changed and the way we all communicate.
So does Road XS transport software reduce your intelligence? In a word, no. What Road XS does is take the mundane tasks you used to do and enables you to work to a higher standard. You still need to interact with the passengers and drivers and you still need to speak to people. Road XS also provides you the information to make your own intelligent decisions. Without the data and information, you can’t make accurate assessments of your transport services.
With budget cuts looming and passenger demand on the increase, how do transport providers meet this demand? The answer is the layer of software in between. It allows you to work faster, with less staff, less resources and enables you to pool resources together keeping you calm and in control.
The irony in all of this, Road XS takes your processes and does all the thinking for you so you don’t have to. It means you can get better at the social side and dealing hands-on with the customers, your passengers. Which is a good thing, right?…
