Internet Explorer 11 is not so future in my book.

While I’m not a food blogger, I’m happy to support Plant Power’s overall mission. More plant based food – not just Impossible or Beyond meat alternatives are good in my book, even if the vegan options end up mimicking the problems of fast food. One battle at a time, right?

It’s just that the innovations don’t stop there. I’ve got a longer Facial Recognition post coming up, so my hot take is “No, I don’t support this”. I actively opt out of this sort of infrastructure. Having worked on facial-tracking kiosk tech as a special project during my career, I am happy to report at how slippery the slope can be from “awesome use case” to “creepy use case we probably don’t want the customers to know about”.

Luckily, the technology didn’t work, downed by the simple internet.

This is a recurring theme: kiosk systems don’t seem to have a local mesh network option enabled. Wouldn’t that be a better fallback? I can easily imagine a future of food tech tablets that – if the internet is missing – all connect to each other plus a central office computer to continue placing and routing orders. Perhaps even processing payments locally, or storing transactions for processing after the fact? Or at least routing orders and creating instructions to pay at the front.

Another option is to rely on the internet of the end user – once an order is placed, a ticket is printed with a QR code – the user can scan it to complete payment, which will route the full order to the cooks.

There’s a lot of interesting possibilities, but “Internet is Offline” is not one of them.