Why isn’t technology being used to make more everyday things easier?

Here’s a question I often ask myself, and especially when traveling: why must I be required to purchase a paper ticket that I then have to line up to show to somebody to access my means of transport?

This paper ticket system is completely inefficient and makes no sense given today’s technology: in London, since 2014, metro and bus users can, in addition to paying with an Oyster Card, a prepaid system already issued to over ten million users and used daily by more than 80% of travelers, use the same electronic readers to pay with contactless credit cards or with their smartphones. Progress in the implementation of the system is such that buses in the city no longer accept payment in cash.

These types of systems are becoming more and more widespread: there are already more than eighty cities in the world whose transport systems use contactless cards, and credit card companies also interested in the method, which is a key element of what has become known as the smart city.

As a result of the slowness — or ineptitude — of some companies and administrations in moving to ticketless, cashless systems, creating needless delays and inefficiencies. Boarding a plane is one of them: we can now use our smartphone or even smartwatch at the different stages of boarding a plane, but this improvement is eradicated by the need to show our passport or identity card, which is supposedly for our security, although inspection of the document is carried out in a few seconds. Air travel is, in practice, a demonstration of how not to do things: queues, cursory passport controls, passengers who jump the line, and so on.

In practice, it would be much more logical to verify our identity via the electronic devices we carry. A smartphone or a smartwatch are intrinsically personal devices, equipped with sensors and communication systems capable of verifying my identity in much more rigorous ways than a fleeting glance at my identity card or passport. Unlocking my smartphone with my fingerprint is a much more rigorous test of my identity than comparing my face with a photo that may well be several years old. We could develop systems, for example, that are based on more than one factor — something I have, like the telephone, attached to something I know, like a password, or something that I am, like a fingerprint or an image of my retina making it possible to pass through security pretty much automated requiring no human intervention except in a few isolated cases. The technology already exists, and could be rolled out very quickly, with the added incentive of further developing said technology.

The development and progressive implementation of systems such as Android Pay, Apple Pay and others, has undoubtedly helped in redefining many transactions in terms of convenience and with levels of security far superior to their traditional alternatives, but nevertheless, the transformation of identity documents to electronic format, although this would make a huge contribution in terms of comfort and safety, has yet to happen. In India, the development of Aadhaar, the nationwide biometric database, accompanied by IndiaStack, a set of APIs that allow developers to create applications from it, part of the momentum of a president absolutely convinced of the need to use technology has been criticized as a threat to privacy and focused on solving the government’s problems, not those of the Indian people, with some of those concerns heightened because of the government’s plans to substitute cash for fingerprint based transactions. Undoubtedly, there has to be a balance between comfort, efficiency and privacy, but they cannot be used as excuses for not moving forward to technology-based systems.

Maybe those of us who study technology or innovation, think that any time frame is too long. But it is also striking that, aside from India, the development of such systems is hopelessly slow in the public and private sectors, despite the many advantages they offer. What needs to be done to overcome resistances and make these systems a reality?

(En espa?ol, aquí)