Farhad Manjoo, New York Times:
Tech has now captured pretty much all visual capacity. Americans spend three to four hours a day looking at their phones, and about 11 hours a day looking at screens of any kind.
So tech giants are building the beginning of something new: a less insistently visual tech world, a digital landscape that relies on voice assistants, headphones, watches and other wearables to take some pressure off our eyes.
And:
Who will bring us this future? Amazon and Google are clearly big players, but don’t discount the company that got us to Peak Screen in the first place. With advances to the Apple Watch and AirPods headphones, Apple is slowly and almost quietly creating an alternative to its phones.
And:
Screens are insatiable. At a cognitive level, they are voracious vampires for your attention, and as soon as you look at one, you are basically toast.
There are studies that bear this out. One, by a team led by Adrian Ward, a marketing professor at the University of Texas’ business school, found that the mere presence of a smartphone within glancing distance can significantly reduce your cognitive capacity. Your phone is so irresistible that when you can see it, you cannot help but spend a lot of otherwise valuable mental energy trying to not look at it.
And:
By placing interior controls on touch screens rather than tactile knobs and switches, carmakers have made vehicles much more annoying and dangerous to interact with. The Tesla Model 3, the most anticipated car on the planet, takes this to an absurd level. As several reviewers have lamented, just about every one of the car’s controls — including adjustments for the side mirrors — requires access through a screen.
This is a terrific read. One quibble for me is the motivation behind moving from real-world, tactile controls to screens. In my mind, it’s not laziness, it’s cost savings. Replacing a knob with a screen setting saves the cost of the knob, as well as the wiring and harness costs, and saves real estate where that button lived. Not to mention the potential for breakage of a moving part.
Follow the money.
That aside, Farhood makes the case for less screens, like so:
If Apple could only improve Siri, its own voice assistant, the Watch and AirPods could combine to make something new: a mobile computer that is not tied to a huge screen, that lets you get stuff done on the go without the danger of being sucked in. Imagine if, instead of tapping endlessly on apps, you could just tell your AirPods, “Make me dinner reservations at 7” or “Check with my wife’s calendar to see when we can have a date night this week.”
To me, that’s the real takeaway. Less screen time without any loss of functionality.
The last example is what Google Duplex seems to be trying to do but I wonder if it’s not biting off a lot of AI stuff to solve a problem that’s solved more easily by other means. I have to think Duplex is a deliberately constrained problem that lets Google research AI vs caring about the restaurant reservation issue.
IF you just want to solve the latter it strikes me that connecting Siri to a service like Opentable via it’s APIs would work fine. Behind the scenes it just has to translate “Get me reservations at Restaurant X for next Tuesday at 7” into API calls for the restaurant, the day and the time, then handle replies (7 isn’t available, 7:30 is) and be able to cache that information and ask followup questions such as “for how many people?” From what I’ve seen of Siri, that kind of thing should be doable so perhaps we’re closer than we think to many of these kinds of screen-free interactions.
Even opening the glove compartment is done with the touchscreen in the Model 3. That’s not cheaper than a physical latch. That’s just “we’re all-in on this touchscreen.”