Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

I told the clerk to un-cancel our order and that we would simply not take the second exactly-the-same shirt and tie combination, but would rather leave with just one and forgo waiting for someone to tunnel to china to determine from the manufacturer whether this second exactly-the-same shirt and tie were, in fact, exactly the same and therefore should cost the same as the first.

After un-cancelling our order we were then presented with the payment options. We chose debit. Unfortunately for us, some technology-loving but human-hating decision maker had installed touch screen debit card machines at the Burlington Coat Factory. These machines present a full-color graphic display of a standard numeric keypad. This apparently is much better than just a real button pad because a graphic keypad is graphical. However, after one hundred and forty thousand aggravated consumers have rapped out their PIN numbers on such a pad, they become nothing more than a great place to practice your pen-tapping skills. We tried several times to enter our PIN number, but to no avail. We paid cash.

Now this is what worries me. I have been a huge fan of Star Wars for a very long time. Naturally this is the future of mankind -- laser guns, space travel, robots (droids). I just made a giant connection this weekend between the state of technology today, and the state of droid technology in the future. Today we have a great deal of potential uses for technology, but instead of doing something useful like figuring out a way to ensure that every product in a super-mega discount store can be easily purchased, we develop unuseful but very colorful display pads that are easily broken so that we can't actually buy the unmarked merchandise from the super-mega discount store.

Now extend this to the future. We can develop robots fluent in over six million forms of communication, but our most useful robot speaks in beeps and whines therefore requiring a second, more emotional interpreter. In addition, our most useful robots can unlock every door on every planet and in any space station with ease, but they don't have a built in communicator so we have to hope that they don't forget (or turn off) the one we lend them. And finally, our most useful robots can fly basically any of our spaceships, but they have such a limited range of motion that they can't actually get in or out of any ship unassisted (unless you saw Revenge of the Sith where apparently they have a jumping feature that they only use one out of every six movies).

So, I'm urging technologists everywhere: go back to buttons when buttons work, otherwise we might end up flying through a star or bouncing too close to a supernova just because we can't type the data into the navi-computer.