Current things that might seem weird in the future

(Future) ancient artifacts on display:

Hot water tanks: Primitive, wasteful tanks used to heat and store water for home use as late as the 21st Century.

Credit Cards/Debit Cards/etc: How ridiculous would it be to carry around *plastic cards *to get access to goods and services?

Facebook and its terrible primitiveness.

I’ve said it before: Blood transfusion. “You mean you went and had some of your blood taken out, so somebody else could get it put in? Why not just use synthetic blood?”

The bruhaha over same sex marriage willl be considered the same way we regard the bruhaha over inter-racial marriage. “But if two people of the same sex really loved each other, why couldn’t they get married?”

I wonder what they’ll think when they review 2010’s porn.

How stupid is smoking going to look in a few hundred years?

They dried the leaves, rolled them in paper, lit them on fire and purposely breathed the burning fumes into their lungs? Huh?

(Apologies to Bob Newhart and his old routine on Sir Walter Raleigh introducing tobacco to the old country.)

That reminded me of a funny one. There was a cartoon called something like Zeta some years ago; it had these amusing “modern things as seen from the future” clips at the end that I caught a few of. One of which showed a safety pin:

Voiceover: “This was called a safety pin, used for pinning diapers to babies.”

Girl (horrified): “They pinned diapers to babies?!

Voiceover: “It was a barbaric time.”

I still don’t get this about watches. Sure, I could look at my phone for the time, but (a) if outside, I’d have to find a shady spot to easily read it, (b) I’d have to unlock the screen, (c) I’d have to work the slider touch menu to get to where the time display is. How is simply lifting my left wrist to look at a dial not five times less hassle? Even a pocket watch would be a lot more efficient than the phone in this regard.

ETA: MPSIMS seems to fit fine for this thread.

The trouble with this is that media technology is changing so fast. We could have wired our whole house with ethernet, but why bother now that we have wireless? And on and on. Building all this stuff into the house locks you in to current technology. In 30 or 40 years or so we’ll have wireless networking over the entire country, and you’ll be able to instantly stream any media created since Edison on any device in any format, seamlessly. You won’t need to build the media infrastructure into your house, because any device will just play whatever you want whenever you want.

Okay, here goes:

If I want to go to a different floor in a building, I can step inside a box, push a button, and exit the box on the chosen floor. (elevator)

If I want to speak with someone who is not present, I push buttons on a small box to connect to their box. (cell phone)

If I want to view entertaining moving pictures with sound or information, there’s a box on the wall or on a table that can show me a whole new world. (television or computer)

If I want to heat up or cook some food, I place it in a box in the kitchen, push some buttons, and only seconds or minutes later it’s ready. (microwave)

There’s a box for everything!

Perhaps, but I probably wont be building my house then [40 years from now when it is finally invented] , I will be building it under the [then] current tech … and I am not going to not install whatever is the most current on the vague vaporware promise of tech yet to come. I want to use my network now[maybe 5 years or so] not in 40 years.

But with current technology, the only thing you need is a wireless router repeater in each room. What exactly are you going to have built in? Speakers, perhaps? I can see running speaker wire from a central media center for best quality…

Ditto for organ transplants. “Come on Granny, you really expect me to belive that doctors used to remove organs from corpses and transplant them into living people?”

After the Great Cybernetic Upload Revolution: “What?! People used to be made out of meat?! That’s disgusting!

t seems like most people have figured it out now (or they adjust automatically now, or maybe there’s just more consistency in how things are broadcast), but for a long time, most household flatscreen tv’s and every public tv (in restaurants, at airports, in doctors’ waiting rooms) had the aspect ratio misset.

It’s somewhat rare for images of a working television to be captured on television, but it happens often enough that I wondered if anyone would notice in the future.

“Dad, why did televisions back then stretch everyone’s faces out like that?”
“They didn’t all do that. Just the newest ones.”
“Just the newest ones? Was it because everyone was fat back then and they wanted the people on tv to be fat, too?”
“No, that’s just how the new tv’s worked back then. I think there was supposed to be a way to fix it so they didn’t do that, but I don’t think anyone ever figured it out.”
“But why would anyone buy a new tv if it made everyone look all stretched out like that?”
“The old tv’s were bulky and uncool. If you wanted a new tv with a better picture, you had to get one that stretched people’s faces. You just got used to it after a while.”
“Mommmmmmmm! Dad’s making stuff up again!”

Just imagine if someone making a scifi movie in the 70s had showed every future monitor with a screwed up aspect ratio! Who would have believed it? I mean, apparently we all get used to low-res monochrome holograms eventually, but that would have seemed ridiculous!

We probably won’t even need artificial blood, as we will have developed the ability to naturally stop blood loss, self-heal and regenerate tissue, just like dolphins already do.

The practice of medicine won’t even remotely resemble what we know today. “Researchers in the Netherlands say they’ve developed a pill that can be loaded with medicine and programmed to travel to a specific part of the body to unload it. A pen-size device is being developed at the University of Texas that can detect skin cancer without the need for a biopsy.” And that’s what’s happening now! Many, many diseases will be completely eradicated. Just like polio is a disease of the past, there will be no more cancer, no more HIV/AIDS, no more autoimmune diseases like lupus or MS.

Libraries will be museums. No one will go to one to actually check out a physical book made of paper to read.

Meh. Wireless is fine for when you need wireless, but I don’t ever see the tech replacing a nice hot wired connection.

Our use of bandwidth continues to rise to meet available capacity, and that’s not going to change any time soon. Current wireless tech can deliver (at best) what? - a* tenth *of the speed of old-fashioned copper. Maybe? Currently just about a twentieth.

Me, I’m pulling fibre optics along with my CAT6 cable with an eye to the future. So what if I don’t have any hardware that can make use of it?

If we can get wireless speeds up to 100mbs, that’ll be awesome for my phone. I’m gonna need the 100GB optical connection for my workhorse PC, media players, etc, though - and wireless ain’t ever gonna get there. Jack me in, thanks.

Michio Kaku made an interesting speech at a university in New York about the world of the future. The three things that really seemed interesting to me was about the internet, future contact lenses and toilets.

Just like today when we walk in to a room we assume that the room has electricity in it. If you want to charge your cell phone you can be reasonably sure that what ever room you walk into you will have a place to extract electricity from the wall. You want light in the room you look for the switch, you assume its there. The internet in the future will be the same way. There will be no laptops or smart phones the internet and computing power will be part of your house. There will be smart wallpaper that can change from yellow stripes to psychedelic in an instant. It will be your TV your computer and a million other things.

The future contact lens floored me. He said that in the future your contact lens will have a chip and directly place images in your eye for augmented reality. His example was of being able to go to the coliseum in Rome and your contact lens will be able to recreate the coliseum as it was during the height of the Roman Empire. It will have facial recognition so you will never forget someones name again. Their name and bio can appear next to them as you talk to them. My favorite was that distance can become irrelevant. If you are in LA and want to have dinner with your mother in NY your sister in FL and aunt in Germany then everyone just puts on their contact lens “calls” each other and the augmented reality that the contact lens presents to you and your loved ones is everyone at your table having dinner.

As for the toilet of the future it could literally be the cure for cancer. It would do hundreds of tests for you every time you visit the jon. It will tell you, quit drinking so much beer or you had way to much El Pollo Loco this week and your cholesterol is rising. It can detect minute proteins caused by cancer cells and let you know very early on when a tumor has started.

I think the people in this thread are like the kids in the 50’s thinking we would drive to work in flying cars. Baseballs caps? I tend to believe that wind and rain are pretty much constants, are we going to stop wind and rain or stop caring about it in our eyes? Language will change, dress will change, your choice of timepiece will change, but there are certain undeniable physical facts of life that will not change however much you want then too.

My own personal belief is that a lot of little insignificant changes will happen that we will herald as society changing events, but the end result will be the same as always.

I suspect a picture phone here. Would most people want their toilet telling them to stop drinking beer or eating fast food? Detecting cancer, sure, but I think a toilet that nags you about your lifestyle would not be likely to catch on in the market.