Is it just because I'm an old or does everybody kind of hate touch screens? Like, as a technology, it's the worst, right?
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Above: a gif of multiple Oscar winner Meryl Streep agreeing with me. |
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Wow, that's way more interesting than watching the road. |
I ask because Volkswagen announced
the triumphant return of buttons and nobs to the interiors of their electric vehicles. Up to this point they--and I think a lot of car manufacturers--had been steadily decreasing the number of physical controls in favor of a single big touchscreen located in the center of the console. It's like they just started gluing iPads to dashboards. I don't follow the auto industry, my car is just a thing I use to get places, but I think this is pretty universal now, especially with electric cars.
Ever stuck your head into a Tesla? Maybe just to ask the driver what it feels like to drive a car from a company owned by a fascist and named after a eugenicist? I've never driven one, but it seems, you know distracting. Dangerously distracting. The screen that is, not the deplorable politics of Elon Musk and Nikola Tesla, although, yikes, right?
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Although it's not like Teslas need distracted drivers to help them run over pedestrians. |
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Touch screens work alright on Star Trek, but I think it may seriously take another four-hundred years to work them out. |
VW was getting complaints about how frustrating it is to use touch screens, and I 100% agree. I got a new used car over the summer and it has a small touch screen in the center. It doesn't really control any of the car's vital functions, it's mainly for linking to my phone so I can control my podcast or make calls or whatever, but it kind of sucks. Sure, it looks high tech, but it feels vague and unresponsive and I end up calling the wrong person because the contact list kept scrolling or my finger slipped, or I pressed too hard, or not hard enough. Finicky is the word, I think.
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Curmudgeon is, evidently, a valid career path. |
It just seems like too unreliable a technology to trust people lives with, you know? I mean, Volkswagen's motivations here are almost certainly purely monetary. Sure, everyone hates them, but corporations don't change a thing unless they decide that
not changing will cost them more (thanks Milton Friedman). Whatever the motivation, I suppose I appreciate the fact that they're walking back touch screens. It's validating in a way that appeals to the air of curmudgeonliness I've been trying to cultivate.
Does this just come with age? This desire to bristle at the new? A perverse joy taken from watching innovations prove themselves untenable? I don't know. But what I do know is that while touch screens might feel like the future, they're also slippery, uncertain, and potentially lethal...which, I guess is also true of the future.
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Remember that time someone put Mega Man 2--a game famous for requiring precision and accuracy--on to smart phones? You don't? That's because it was a terrible mistake and everybody hated it. |
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