The Future Is Touchless

Back in March, shortly after the coronavirus had been deemed a national crisis, I walked into a 7-Eleven to pick up a late-night snack. Taped to the door was a makeshift sign warning not to touch the Slurpee machine to limit the risk of viral spread. I glanced at the coolers full of soft drinks, the touchscreen payment reader beside the cash register, the plastic surface of the smartphone case I'd touched perhaps 2,600 times that day. Maybe the Slurpee machine was riskier by some small degree than these other surfaces, but by how much? The whole strange episode called me to wonder if people would recall this time as the death knell of public touchscreens, or at least the dawn of a new era in conversant interfaces, an age in which our voices, not our hands, would help us navigate the world.