You haven't been in modern construction equipment. They are even more touch screens than any car. They are also a lot more automated - in some cases the only purpose of the operator is to watch for kids running into the construction site and hitting the emergency stop. (the operator because he is there is watching the screens as well, but the only thing that couldn't technically be done from an office given a good network connection is watching for safety issues)

[–] otacon239@feddit.de 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I honestly shouldn’t even be surprised. I know that 80% of the reason everything is a screen is cost. If you just slap a screen in the center console, all of your controls are done. Now it’s just software development that’s already been mostly done on the previous model and can be copy-pasted. No more engineering physical dials and buttons in a logical layout. Plus, it can always be fixed in an update right? They certainly wouldn’t think of making the feature set worse or more distracting with future versions… right?

[–] bluGill@kbin.social 2 points 5 months ago

The display on construction equipment is showing the "blueprint" of what the site should look like when done, something that cannot be done with individual switches. The machine is then driving the correct path (using GPS) to make the site look like the blueprint. This is similar to self driving, except that they don't pretend they are safe to operate on public streets.