That could be a real experience for children in the not too distant future.
We are seeing more and more appliances coming out with less buttons and a mobile app to access advanced features. Also cars (annoyingly) are coming out with more physical controls replaced by touchscreen interfaces. It's not hard to imagine a world without physical buttons becoming a reality.
The days of digital buttons might also be numbered. Apps designed for touched enabled interfaces, particularly on mobiles, support swipes and gestures to perform different actions. There is no obvious indication you can perform an action with a swipe or gesture. Having grown up pre-internet with physical buttons, dials, sliders etc I automatically look for the digital equivalent for interaction, I don't assume I can swipe or gesture to do something. I have to resort to searching for "how do I do x with y" to find out.
Children on the other hand spend a lot of time playing with new things. they are far more likely to discover swipe or gesture through play. As an adult I am much more task oriented, I'm not looking to play I'm looking to get the thing done.
As children grow up in a world without physical buttons, they may not see the relevance of digital equivalents and lean towards swipe, gesture, voice control etc. Digital buttons may disappear.
An example of an similar technological shift happened for many pre-Boomers with the introduction of Video Cassette Recorders (VCRs). My father grew up with analog clocks and watches. Time was told by two or three hands on a clock face. When VCRs became more affordable in the 80s they came with digital clocks. He could read the time off the digital display but couldn't make the leap to setting a recording time by putting it into program mode then using buttons to set a record start time and duration. To him, time was set by moving the clock hands or twisting a watch dial.
The introduction of flat-UI bothered me in it threw away a visual indication that this "thing" is a clickable button. I obviously not fully adapted to swipes and gestures. I feel like a few steps down the path for whatever the future equivalent of "can't program the VCR" is. I hope the advent of LLMs will make it easy enough for application developers to produce multiple UIs for different classes of user button users, swipe users, whatever the next thing is (brain wave control??).
> We are seeing more and more appliances coming out with less buttons and a mobile app to access advanced features. Also cars (annoyingly) are coming out with more physical controls replaced by touchscreen interfaces. It's not hard to imagine a world without physical buttons becoming a reality.
And thay is a regression and a mistake. Putting touch screens on cars was a big mistake, children will struggle to drive and turn on/off something as we do, you can't have reliable touch during vehicle movement. It's just stupid. I won't be surprised when regulators will requires some, not all, appliances to have hard buttons. Espacially cars. My car touch screen sometimes suffer a 1 second delay between touches, that's just bad product development, no children will adapt to that, only if braindead