Obligatory "Minority Report" reference. ©2002, DreamWorks SKG

Recently there have been a few rumblings about how in the “future” there won’t be any buttons, moving parts, discs, or anything else mechanical.  While it is true that technology is driving in the general direction of “solid state,” I think it’s a little early to say that we will experience anything close to a complete transformation. If computer graphics and robots have something as difficult to over come as the Uncanny Valley, then who’s to say that there won’t be a similar reaction for physical interactions.

Uncanny Valley is the hypothesis that at a point at which digital characters or robots looks to real, human observers are repulsed by it. Specifically, Uncanny is a Freudian concept in which an object is familiar, and yet foreign at the same time, resulting in an uncomfortable feeling.  I’ve heard negative reactions to touch screens from many people, even as touch screen devices have proliferated. All you have to do is stand behind someone in a line as they struggle with an ATM or checkout because they press the screen to no effect — or worse, to the wrong effect.

The iPhone is the poster boy for this debate, well on its way to becoming the most popular smart phone. Is the touch screen the iPhone’s raison d’être?  Personally, I give as much (or more) credit to the operating system, industrial design, and developer program. After all, these are just as crucial in march to 80 thousand+ apps and 2 billion app downloads which has made this device the next computing platform.

Looking back at history, early “iPhone killers” tried to match the touch screen but found little success. More recently, they have taken to developing their own app stores — vis a vis BlackBerry, Nokia’s Ovi, and Microsoft’s Marketplace.

In the future buttons very well may disappear from many products, and hard drives may be replaced by ubiquitous networks or solid state drives. There are certainly reasons for having solid state drives because they are just simply better. But people don’t interact with disk drives physically, and getting rid of something like a keyboard is a completely different animal.

Here’s the thing: there is something visceral about actually touching and interacting with hardware. Just look at the Kindle and other e-readers. These products are more efficient in many ways, but still we have many holdouts who refuse to give up their hardcover or paperback volumes. There is a feeling to reading an actual page and flipping it to continue that we can’t seem to replace easily.

So, are we resistant to change? (After all, Amazon.com still sells Rotary Phones!) Or is there a reason that books and keyboards are desirable? Can things like haptic feedback really make it possible to type on a touchscreen without having to stare down at our hands? Will we ever have a computer interface that mimics flipping through hundreds of pages in a book in just a few seconds to find the text on the page that we remember vaguely from the last time we read?