I’m sure all of my homies know about this story, but if you’re not one of us, you may not have heard that there’s a plan afoot in my hometown of Auburn, Maine to give iPads to all the incoming kindergarten students this fall. The idea is that by giving the youngest students the devices they can jumpstart reading for them, and the school board hopes to be able to come up with the $200K for the devices through private sponsors, but it acknowledges that if the funding doesn’t materialize, the money will come from local taxpayers. So, unsurprisingly, there’s quite a bit of opposition by local parents.
Meanwhile, not only are iPads going to replace kindergarten teachers, they’re also probably going to replace waitstaff at your favorite chain restaurant any day now. Slate describes one company that’s already pilot-testing putting iPads at tables in restaurants to let patrons order their own food directly by making choices on the device that are sent via WiFi to the kitchen, eliminating the need to have a server come to your table to take the order. Of course, they still need people to deliver orders and do a variety of other tasks related to food service, but the robots will be along to handle those jobs soon enough.
(SImularly, the New York Times says that pretty soon we’ll be able to do away with lawyers and let computer software take care of all of our legal needs. From there, it’s just one little step to having a lawyer app on your iPad, so that you can sue anyone anywhere anytime! Isn’t technology wonderful?)
While iPads may be teaching our kids how to read someday, letting us ask for our salad dressing on the side, or filing a restraining order against that creepy guy who keeps walking past our house, we may be getting a little ahead of ourselves. According to Google, almost 20% of people who own smartphones never use them to go online and a whopping 32% don’t use apps at all. And we already know that apps only get used one time by the people who download them 26% of the time.
