| One thing I'm constantly baffled by in current technology is how it seems to be targeted at one pretty precise subset of human population: young, healthy, single people without any problems with perfectly pre-defined schedules and organized lives. Speaking English, having an OCD and being relatively wealthy is a bonus. Only when you live alone might you be comfortable constantly speaking with your devices. Only if your life if perfectly predefined can you let your fridge order the same food that just gone stale or has been eaten. And only when you are young and healthy and not in any way differing from the "standard" would you be capable of working like these "researchers" imagine you to. I'm not that person. I'm constantly failing at doing "triple-finger-taps" whenever I'm in need of one. I have a smartwatch with pedestrian navigation and never bothered to remember which vibration pattern means which turn. I don't configure different vibration patterns for different callers on the phone. I have a folding phone, but I almost never do side-by-side windows and when I do, I need to find out how to do that first -- and then how to leave that mode without losing my mind. I almost never use AI features on my phone not because I don't want to, but because I never remember how to activate them. I don't re-configure my gadgets to "fit my mood". I hate recommendations like "you like X, here's Y, it's the same!" I hate that I can't rest my mouse cursor on websites anymore without selecting something actionable, moving, animating or autoplaying. All of the examples on the linked page are workflows I would never do this way. I won't be talking to my shopping list to double the ingredients. I won't be drawing gestures with my mouse on a document to activate a voice command. I won't use voice commands in general because as it turns out, I'm not capable of bringing out a complete coherent sentence without pausing and/or changing my mind and/or realizing I'm wrong once. I appreciate those demos for the progress they are showing. It's impressive and astonishing to see restaurants getting extracted from videos or pictures getting expanded or text edited better than I ever could. It's all modern-day magic in a way. One thing it all isn't is a product. We don't have those anymore -- all we get are gimmicks. We don't do common interfaces anymore either, we are separating people in Google/Apple/Xiaomi camps. And most importantly we don't use that technology for good except for a bunch of people writing e-mails all day, doing shopping lists and booking one of top restaurants in Tokyo for the same evening on a whim. We are long overdue for a remake of "American Psycho", but this time it will be a documentary instead of a satire. |