Who would buy a mattress from a screen

Not long ago, a reasonable shop owner in the Gulf could ask who on earth would buy a mattress from a screen. You cannot lie on it. You cannot press a hand into it. You have to wait for it, and if it is wrong, someone has to carry it back down three flights of stairs. Every objection was correct.

Within a decade the question had answered itself, and not in the way the objections suggested. The people ordering on their phones did not solve the problem of lying on it first. They found uses nobody had listed: the size that was never in stock locally, the second one for the guest room bought without a weekend lost to showrooms, the gift sent to a son starting a job in another city, the comparison made at midnight without a salesman watching.

The mistake was not scepticism. It was the shape of the question. Asked on the first day of anything new, "what is this good for?" gets answered with what the thing does badly today. It measures the new against the old and finds it worse at the old job.

A better question looks further out. Twenty years from now, what will people be using this for? That forces you to imagine habits that do not exist yet, built by people who have not grown up yet, around problems nobody is looking at.

We are standing in one of those first days again. There are new tools that write and draw and answer, and most of the talk about them is the mattress conversation all over: they make mistakes, they cannot be trusted, who would use that. All true, today.

The people who look sensible later will be the ones who asked the longer question now, and spent more time imagining than objecting.