Credit: Paul Miller/flickrHi there Backchannel readers, it’s Sandra.

A couple of months ago, my dad told me his driver’s license was about to expire. He had lost most of the vision in one eye after his last driver’s exam, and he wasn’t confident he’d pass the test this time.

I started to brainstorm solutions — he can just Uber! My parents can move closer to town! — but a deep and growing sense of dread kept overwhelming my thoughts. I wondered how my dad would take care of everyday errands. I worried he’d be trapped in the house all day, every day. He’d lose out on the incidental exercise that comes from pottering around town, heading to the grocery store, or zipping off to the library whenever he pleases. Losing all those daily activities struck me as nothing short of disastrous. So I thought about getting him a smartphones.

Consumer technology has not been kind to the older generation. I’ve watched as technological indignities have amassed at a startling rate for my parents. To browse the web, one consults a series of steps spelled out on a notepad. To restart the router, one follows another checklist, documented line by line. To take and then email a photo using an ipads, one flips through a notebook to find where the process was all written down the first time. Brandishing a smart phones at my father and pointing at the Lyft app seemed like a long shot. Too long.

So when I saw Justin Boogaard present his company at YCombinator’s summer Demo Day last week, I felt an immediate jolt of kinship. His startup, GoGoGrandparent, is an automated hotline that lets people without smartphoness summon Uber rides or order groceries. A user dials a phones number, navigates a straightforward menu of options, and orders up the desired service. Against a backdrop of presentations touting a future full of drones, virtual reality and 3D-printed pills, GoGoGrandparent was the only company that spoke to me, and my troubles, right now.

Do I think GoGoGrandparent will someday sprout a unicorn horn? No. Will it even survive another year? Hard to say. As Boogaard acknowledged to me in person at Demo Day, investors were expressing concern about how defensible the company’s platform is. But Boogaard’s idea had one key difference from many of the other incredibly talented, hard-working founders who trotted onto the stage at the Computer History Museum last week: it was rooted in compassion. Thinking of my otherwise able-bodied dad imprisoned in his home because of failing vision bums me to pieces, and here was someone who shared my concern, and better yet, was building a workaround.

This story has a happy ending, though. My dad did pass his vision test, and he renewed his driver’s license a few weeks ago. I’m incredibly relieved. (And I’ve seen him drive: don’t worry, he’s good!) But my admiration for Boogaard still stands.

Elder care services don’t make for great clickbait. It’s not easy to get your heart thumping over a more user-friendly product for the disenfranchised. But for every new live-streaming app, “API for human labor,” or artisanal delivery service (all of which could be great!), I hope there’s a team of founders dreaming of new ways to extend the benefits of technology to more and more people. Many larger companies could have built a similar service to empower people like my dad, but they haven’t. It doesn’t seem quite fair to neglect some humans because they’re too small a market to bother with.

After all, I now wonder what weird inventions will seem like evidence of alien life when I’m in my dotage. Perhaps I’ll be the panicked resident of an artificially intelligent house, such as the one in Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt. Or I’ll go to the store, where dozens of robotic carts will be darting around, picking out meats and vegetables, while I and a few fellow olds shuffle by. (That robotic cart, by the way, also made an appearance at Demo Day.) Will someone look out for us down the road? We are creatures defined by a certain time and place — how will we bridge the gaps between the world we understand, and the one that’s racing ahead without us?

On that happy thought, enjoy your long weekends, everybody!

# This week in Backchannel:

Steven Levy interviewed Hillary Clinton’s domestic policy adviser to learn more about the candidate’s views on tech. Clinton herself highlighted passages of the interview, including: “A lot of our conclusions came back to human capital,” that is, finding ways to invest so that technology creates lots of jobs, rather than just gobbling them up.

We’re in a wild westof passwords and authentication. Despite the existence of single-sign-on services, most of us still struggle to access all our sites and apps across too many devices. Scott Rosenberg profiles Okta, one company that has a very ambitious view of the future of passwords.

Can a new ride-sharing startup take a bite out of Uber? The answer is yes — but it’s complicated. Our own Miranda Katz examines the challenges faced by Gett, an Israeli company that’s huge in Europe but struggling to gain a toehold in New York.