This week, I had the pleasure of taking my kids to school by bike, using a cargo bike. The ride was a great experience, closely experiencing the bustling Mexico City, surrounded by all kinds of smells, colors, and shapes. It transformed an already fun activity into something much more sensory.
During this process, I received many curious looks and comments about my means of transport, which quickly caught the attention of passersby. Although they interact with such bikes every day (many have breakfast directly from one), they seemed surprised by the application I was giving it. In the same way, people are surprised when they see technology applied to something different. This is not a post about AI; it’s a post about technology that comes back, like in my case, the bicycle.
My car is technologically superior in every aspect, but the bike allows me to gain benefits that, for me, have much more value than comfort. The same has happened to me with photography, where my mobile phone is undoubtedly technologically superior to my instant camera, but there is something about the instant photos from my analog camera that maintains an appetite for that slight sepia tone and low definition (although all my relatives protest against my digital camera, they stop once they get a physical picture they can take with them).
Sometimes, both in personal life and in business, we optimize for the wrong goal. It’s then that my bike stops being just a bike and transforms into my family ship, my camera into a time machine, and technology into just another toy.