The other day I was forced to go into a McDonald’s in France to use their WiFi — it’s free and normally very fast. Rather than just lurk in the corner to download my messages, I decided it would be the right thing to buy something to show my gratitude, so I approached the counter. That was my first mistake. I was pointed in the direction of a vertical screen, which I was invited to deal with rather than a living person. My request was not particularly challenging or unusual, I just wanted a cup of coffee, an espresso to be precise. I managed to find the drinks section on the screen, further taps took me to the coffee, additional taps confirmed that I did not want cream with it, and eventually, a few taps later, I was instructed to choose my method of payment. I picked cash. A further tap produced a ticket with a number on it, and the command to go to the counter where I had started the process so I could hand over my €1 coin. The entire transaction had wasted about five minutes of my life. The fulfilment of a simple request — ask for coffee, hand over money, receive cup of said hot brown liquid — has been turned into a charade by some clown of a technology geek. And the coffee wasn’t even that good. It’s not just McDonald’s that seems intent on turning a basic request into a complicated procedure. In places where they are prepared to talk to you rather than direct you to a screen, you can still find yourself waiting while the server inputs information lengthier than a Shakespeare play. I understand that it might be conveying information to somebody in a depot somewhere to deliver more bananas, but why is this any of my business? Not all technology is bad, and I am certainly no Luddite. But one does feel at times that technology changes, along with endless updates, just because we think that’s what technology does. That old rule that technology doubles in speed every 18 months no longer holds true. Moore’s Law is turning into Sod’s Law. Often the changes are minute, and frequently, nonsensical. My wife updated her iPhone the other day only to find that somebody was able to call her at 6am even though she had it switched to airplane mode. My teenage daughters now refuse to update anything. They risk becoming like the Amish, turning their backs on technology and everything digital. One daughter develops photographs in a darkroom; the other plays records on a gramophone. Of course, having grown up with Google maps, they take such magic for granted. I still recall the heated arguments that used to occur every summer holiday at regular intervals on the Paris Peripherique when my mother would give an instruction from the giant map scrunched on her lap and my father would head in the wrong direction, blaming everybody but himself. Now we still take wrong turnings, but we can blame the person talking on the satnav. If we are moving toward an ever more complex automated world, which seems the case, it appears clear that we should embrace only those advances that truly bring a benefit. Rupert Wright And some technologies are positively useful. Not long after having my cup of coffee at McDonald’s, I drove to a carwash. I stood admiring the rather reptilian machine that sprayed, buffed, polished and dried the car, washing away the Saharan sand that had fallen in a rainstorm, and was delighted that it was a machine getting wet and not me. But I feel it is important that we take a stand in opposing worthless technological developments. If my screen at McDonald’s had somehow given me a perfect cup of coffee in a couple of touches, I’d be as happy with it as George Clooney looks in every Nespresso advertisement. But it didn’t. There is an advert running in England for BP showing how you can pay for your fuel via your mobile phone. But much better than that, as still happens in much of the Middle East, is when somebody fills up your car so you don’t end up smelling of petrol for the rest of the day. If we are moving toward an ever more complex automated world, which seems the case, it appears clear that we should embrace only those advances that truly bring a benefit. For every person delighted with bitcoins and blockchain technology, there is another who finds cash acceptable, portable and, frankly, very handy to use. Everyone boasts about how they can buy pizzas with bitcoins, but how much of an advance is that? I’ve been buying pizzas for years with £10 notes, and that seems to work perfectly well. Getting the same service by another method is not necessarily improvement, it just becomes a chore. People need to learn to live with technology, and when necessary, reject it. It should be a servant, not a master. How many couples do you see sitting side by side, but rather than talking to each other or looking around, they are looking at screens? And not just in McDonald’s. Rupert Wright is chairman of Ashbright, a communications firm with offices in Europe and the Middle East. He was a journalist for 25 years, writing mainly for The Times and Financial Times, and latterly The National in Abu Dhabi.