We are just going to be ping-ponging back & forth between three idiotic subideal situations, buttons versus touchscreens versus phone control. It's going to be

We are just going to be ping-ponging back & forth between three idiotic subideal situations, buttons versus touchscreens versus phone control. It's going to be a decade of no synergy, of no programmability, of no softness. Ideally there are semi flexible reconfigurable systems, with a couple physical buttons & knobs, and some touchscreen displays, and the phones can also via local area APIs be given permission to control & manipulate the car too. But we just don't have a mature software ecosystem in general to support the complex assortment of peripherals (av, hvac, lighting, windows, seats, etc) that cars present. This is a crisis because it's one of the softest most configurable most attuneable things mankind has made, and we have only crude ability to carve in stone some choices that then will broadly apply. These systems are firmer than soft, and that's a broad problem the CS world in general has helped little with in the last decade (after extremely involved & interested work in uniquotous & pervasive computing simmered away).