Some of my earliest memories, as well as some of my cherished memories, are special Saturday nights when my family and I got to go out to a restaurant for dinner. It wasn’t the food or the atmosphere that made these Saturdays special, it was the idea of my family being together in one place. The dinners weren’t fancy, nor were the conversations that we had. In fact, I later learned that what I liked about these dinners was even I, a six-year-old at the time, had an integral role in the conversation. Those dinners made me feel safe and important.

So, I was taken aback when I walked into Olive Garden a couple of weekends ago and found a tablet, called a Ziosk, which provided tabletop electronic entertainment while customers wait. My “special dinners” were disrupted. I was sad to see that my eight-year-old brother, instead of engaging in the dinner conversation, was busy playing some game on the Ziosk. It hit me then that my brother would not cherish these dinners as much as I did.

In November of last year, Olive Garden joined Chili’s and numerous other casual dining restaurants in using Ziosks. Ziosk, a Dallas-based company, has risen as the runaway market leader in the e-menu business. Ziosk’s tablets are now deployed in more than 1,500 restaurants across America, claiming a 95 percent market share. The concept is pretty simple—instead of waiting for your waiter to come by, you use a small 7-inch, networked Android tablet to order at your leisure. The tablets have encrypted payment facilities, allowing customers to pay at the table whenever they like. The main goal of this is to reduce wait time for customers, so instead of waiting to catch your server’s attention you swipe your credit card and leave whenever you want. The Ziosk has over 20 games downloaded on it as well as a built in printer for receipts.

While the amenities and technology of the Ziosk are amazing, a robot waiter breaks the whole idea of family dinners. Instead of being able to chat and build relationships with a waiter, we now get to click a couple of buttons and our dinner is here. Nowadays, it seems that it doesn’t take more than a couple of colorful buttons to attract people. The games and trivia quizzes on the tablet now serve to fire up dinner conversations. Has our society really come to a point where we need a tablet to tell us what to talk about? The tablet is supposed to attract restless kids who can’t sit still. Have our kids become such a burden to us that rather than talking to them about their day it is easier to occupy them with a game on the tablet? Another amenity of the Ziosk is the built in camera. The camera allows people to take a group selfie and then immediately upload to social media. Have we become so obsessed with social media that we cannot wait 20 minutes before posting?

The whole purpose of the Ziosk seems to be to discourage conversation at the dinner table. It seems it is much easier for us to press a couple of buttons than to have a real conversation with a waiter. Everyone keeps saying that our generation is too obsessed with technology, and restaurants like Olive Garden and Applebee’s are proving this theory to be correct. If a tablet is put in front of us, obviously we will compelled to use it.

As I looked around the Olive Garden, I noticed couples and other families falling into the technology trap. No longer was the restaurant I once loved bustling with conversations. Instead, mostly silence filled the room. It saddens me that children like my brother will no longer have the memories and cherish the restaurant experience as much as I did.