Feb 5, 2015 3 min read

The key to getting rich, we have often heard, is to find something everyone needs, then sell it to them.

Entrepreneurs over the past several centuries looked at arduous tasks and found ways to make them easier, and themselves richer in the process. Hanging laundry to dry, for example, must have been a frustrating exercise until someone came up with the idea of the clothespin. Later, the clothes dryer made life so much easier. Someday, someone may come up with a devise that extracts water from clothes almost instantly without the use of heat, and everyone will want one.

But for now, commercial geniuses are creating applications for mobile devices – apps, for short – that gather and manipulate information to perform a wide range of tasks. Why anyone would need some of these apps is a mystery. What advantage is gained by being able to regulate the temperature of your refrigerator or operate your washing machine in Pennsylvania while you’re vacationing in Patagonia?

Now, it seems, the mantra for business success is: Find something nobody really needs and sell it to them anyway.

Some of these apps may have unintended and unfortunate consequences. We call our readers’ attention to an article in Wednesday’s Observer-Reporter recounting the Town Hall South lecture by David Pogue, New York Times science columnist and author. Pogue talked about the increasing rate of “disruptive tech,” or technology that is upending the usual rhythms of life. The lecturer is not necessarily opposed to this disruption and finds many new innovations personally useful, including the app Task Rabbit, which allows one to post a task that needs doing and find the lowest bidder willing to do it. Pogue said when his wife was running a marathon in a distant city, he used it to hire someone with flowers to stand at the finish line.

We have to wonder how Mrs. Pogue would recognize her well-wisher for hire. Perhaps the low bidder was holding a hand-written sign with her name on it, like the ones held in the luggage area of the airport by those bored and annoyed men who never smile. We can imagine the reaction of the exhausted runner as the reality of this hollow, callous, yet convenient, gesture began to sink in, as she might have scrounged for money to tip the indifferent flower presenter.

Imagine how Task Rabbit could be used to skirt other bothersome obligations. Why attend your child’s play, or even his high school graduation when for 20 bucks you can hire someone to sit there and hold up a sign reading, “Way to go, Jason! Your dad thinks you’re super!” It’s just that his priorities are screwed up.

Pogue warned his audience not too many years from now we will look back and guffaw at what was in 2015 the wondrous iPhone 6. We will by then have moved on to something even more capable of performing all tasks known to humankind.

We hope not. Instead, we wish future entrepreneurs will realize many of us like to keep life simple and uncomplicated. Maybe by then, when everyone is searching through the time-keeping app on their smart phones to find out not what time it is in Borneo but what the time is in Burgettstown, they’ll reinvent a device that straps to the wrist and does nothing but tell the current time, accessible at a mere glance and without so much as a single keystroke.