The Expanse season 6 makes me worry about the future of touchscreens

Filed under: I hope the future can do betterAs we hurtle towards The Expanse’s sixth and final episode of its sixth and final season — airing this Friday, January 14th — I can’t stop thinking about one thing: how many of this season’s pivotal moments revolved around pressing the wrong button on a touchscreen.“If it comes across that the touchscreen is the hero of the show, then we will have truly failed,” says showrunner Naren Shankar, telling me he objects to my entire line of questioning.I wouldn’t say they failed! Twenty-five minutes into episode 1, shortly after Michio’s touchscreen button fail, Holden is standing on an asteroid that’s been outfitted with its own engine so the Free Navy can fire it at Earth. Sometimes they do some things by talking to it, that doesn’t mean it’s always a voice-to-text parser,” adds Shankar. He’s referencing how season 2, episode 6 flashes back to how an engineer accidentally invented long-range space travel and dies because he can’t turn the engine off; he disabled his crappy voice parser before launch, and the g-forces are too strong for him to reach the other controls.What do touchscreens mean to you?“It’s kind of the same question as ‘why do we use guns instead of laser blasters or something like that?’” says Abraham. We have cartridge guns in The Expanse because they work really well; they’re kind of the sharks of personal weaponry.”“What we’re positing here is that these touchscreens and these kinds of interfaces are robust and work well in these kinds of conditions, where jacking into your brain, maybe not so much?