> Most interactive tech on Star Trek is like this - from phasers to consoles to communicators to voice interactions with the ship's computer.

Almost like the Star Trek mechanisms can infer perfect intent.

Like there’s a hidden script or something.

More seriously, I think there’s real value in an automatic door that behaves consistently rather than one that tries to infer messy human intent. Real life isn’t a TV show and there’s both ambiguity in how people behave and how they even intend to behave. It’s mostly not hard to understand how a proximity sensor door will function. Using a black-box classifier to improve that won’t necessarily make people like it more. And calling up to the cloud for every sensor event, ignoring privacy issues, adds weird latency and a huge failure mode during data center outages.