As someone who’s often hunting for a sneaky nap-time opportunity, I am, for the most part, excited by the prospect of self-driving cars. That said, there will be inevitable losses, most of which have been discussed to death. One such loss — albeit a quiet one — has been on my mind recently: the loss of the Learner Driver experience.
The ability to drive is one of the few skills that, for most people, is only acquired as an adult. What’s more, it is a skill that many people at least attempt to learn. The learner experience, therefore, is largely a shared one. Most people will remember those early driving moments — that initial panic as you lurch forward in your 25-year old Nissan Micra and realise the need for full panoramic vision to check for children running in front and cars tailgating behind and bikes nipping in on the side (and what the hell is a clutch anyway?) … and then, one day, it all harmonises. Learning to drive teaches us that, even as adults, we can still pick something up from scratch.
I have a colleague who is learning to code. He’s experiencing that similar drowning in noise feeling — with loops, variables, and the likes juggling around in his head. Fortunately, I had an easy comparison to hand: It’s like learning to drive. In a few years time that comparison will be gone. Those simple reassuring words — “it’s like learning to drive” — will be meaningless.
That said, learning to drive ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, even as an analogy. For starters, it’s not completely shared — there are many people who, for any number of reasons, never sit behind a steering wheel.
Maybe this is an opportunity to change that — to create a genuine shared learner experience . If we recognise and encourage adult learning, then anything is possible. And those reassuring words might well become: It’s like learning parkour. Or guitar. Or, yes, how to code.