About six years ago, my granddaughter Valerie was sitting with me while I tried to find one of her shows on the television.
I was doing what most adults do when technology doesn’t immediately cooperate.
Pressing buttons.
Scrolling through menus.
Backing out.
Trying again.
Muttering under my breath.
After watching this for a minute, Valerie looked at me and said:
“Speak it, Grandma! Speak it!”
At first, I laughed.
But she wasn’t joking.
She knew the remote had voice search.
She knew I could simply tell the television what I wanted to watch instead of navigating through endless menus.
To her, this wasn’t new technology.
It was just the obvious way to do it.
What struck me wasn’t that a four-year-old knew how to use the remote.
It was that she immediately chose the easiest path while I defaulted to the method I had learned years earlier.
I knew the voice button existed.
I just wasn’t using it.
We Get Stuck In Old Interfaces
The longer we work with technology, the more habits we accumulate.
We learn where the buttons are.
We memorize menus.
We develop workflows.
Eventually those workflows become automatic.
The problem is that we often continue using them long after better options become available.
The television remote is a simple example.
But the same thing happens everywhere.
We manually organize files because that’s how we’ve always done it.
We navigate complex software menus because that’s how the software worked when we first learned it.
We spend time searching for information that could be surfaced automatically.
We keep solving today’s problems with yesterday’s tools.
Not because we’re incapable of changing.
Because habits become invisible.
AI Feels Familiar
Lately, I’ve found myself thinking about that conversation with Valerie more often.
Artificial intelligence is creating a similar shift in how we interact with technology.
For decades, software has required us to learn its language.
We filled out forms.
Clicked buttons.
Navigated menus.
Created folders.
Built workflows.
Now, increasingly, software is learning ours.
Instead of navigating through multiple screens, we can simply say:
“Create a task to follow up with this customer next week.”
“Summarize these notes.”
“Write a first draft of this article.”
“Find the information I need.”
The technology is changing, but the challenge remains the same.
Many of us still reach for the buttons first.
The Real Barrier Isn’t Technology
Recently, I started wondering whether I should be using voice-to-text more often.
Not because I can’t type.
I’ve spent decades typing.
The question wasn’t whether voice technology works.
The question was whether I was still doing things the hard way because I was comfortable doing them that way.
That’s a very different question.
Most productivity breakthroughs don’t come from working harder.
They come from recognizing that there’s a simpler path available.
Sometimes the technology has been sitting there the entire time.
Waiting for us to use it.
The Lesson
The older I get, the more I realize that expertise can sometimes become a disadvantage.
Experts know how things have always been done.
Beginners often ask why they need to be done that way at all.
Six years ago, a four-year-old watched me struggle with a remote control and offered the simplest solution imaginable.
“Speak it, Grandma.”
Maybe that’s good advice for more than just finding a television show.
Sometimes progress starts when we stop asking how we’ve always done something and start asking whether we still need to do it that way.