Say "what" again.

spilled milk

My four-year-old’s super power is spilling milk. She spills milk like nobody’s business. Put a glass of milk anywhere on the table and she’ll spill it — always accidentally, never meaning to, somehow her hand or elbow or foot finds it and milk flies everywhere, and the dog leaps happily lappily into action, my wife and I mutter, and my daughter blushes and smirks.

When that happens now I get these flash forwards of her spilling drinks in various stages of her life: spilling beer on her friends at a sorority party, spilling coffee over the boardroom table at her first job, spilling champagne over herself at her wedding. Deep in my heart I know she’ll spill drinks like a champ all her life.

I have flash forwards of my son these days too. He is six and developing unfamiliar habits of caring what his hair looks like and having his heart broken and getting REALLY into football. He is a blossoming Seattle Seahawks fan, destined for heartbreak. He’s a sensitive guy. After the Seahawks lost a recent game, he brooded about it for a few hours before bursting into tears. ”Look at my face!” he shouted, as tears ran down through two small hawk faces we had painted on his cheeks at his request before the game. “LOOK AT MY FACE! I AM NEVER DOING THIS AGAIN!” He asked the next week for us to paint them again, before another loss. I can see his first breakup, his first rejection letter, his first dropped ball in the outfield. But he will bounce back, tougher.

They’re strange, these moments where the futures of your kids flash in front of you. You want everything to be safe and clean but it won’t be. Life is how you roll with it, and you do your best to help them roll well. 

Telling

I like telling my phone what to do. I’ve been using the dictation feature on the phone a LOT - certainly a lot more than expected. If I am using the phone to communicate with someone electronically - a text, an email - I’ll communicate with *the phone* vocally. It’s so damn efficient. Instead of willing my thoughts into text through clumsy thumbs stabbing at glass, I just utter them. <boop> BAM.

This is a far cry from talking through the phone to a bank’s automated voice response unit that can’t even comprehend four digits and ends with you screaming AGENT! into the phone over and over again in desperation to reach a human. This is software that WORKS.

For long writings, I prefer a keyboard, but that will probably change over time as interfaces improve. Siri points to the day when the primary way we interact with machines is voice. “Cook on high for two minutes,” you tell your microwave, using both hands to insert leftover pie. “Record the North Carolina/Duke game and the next debate, and play me the 3 newest episodes of Louie,” you tell your TV, opening Cheetos. 

Of course it makes sense talking to machines - when they get it. And Siri gets it almost every time. Star Trek shit, yo.

If we’re making such advances in human-machine interaction (and we really are), why aren’t there similar advances in human-human interaction? Why is it easier than ever than to interact with a device but just as hard as ever to interact with a cute girl on the bus?

As humans use voice more to interact with machines, we should consider using gestures more when interacting with humans. We have this growing library of gestures we now use to interact with devices (swipe, pinch, drag, so on), but we really only have two universal gestures to interact with each other. One is the thumbs-up (approval!) and the other is the extended middle finger (disapproval!!).

What about a universal gesture for ‘I’m sorry’? So when you accidentally cut another driver off in traffic, you can acknowledge your mistake. Something like your hand to your chin. And a universal gesture for ‘thank you,’ like touching your shoulder. More than anything, the world would benefit if there was a simple, universal gesture for ‘I like your style.’ Think about it. A signal that you could give to a stranger that cuts through the abyss of formality, a signal that says you like what they’re wearing or what they’re doing or how they smile. We don’t really have a gesture like that, and I think it would make interacting with each other - in person - a lot easier.