You’re in for a huge surprise if you’re still around that is…
Might be a form of cell phone but it aint going to look or work the same way
I dont know what Moore’s Law is but yeah, no more typing. It will go the way of cursive writing and eventually actual paper…to the joy of tree huggers :dubious::eek:…they’d rather waste oil on plastic.
I need a disclaimer signature: Trees are a dime a dozen. They re-grow, they are an unending supply…
What input technology do you expect?
I hope it isn’t voice-I hate talking when I can type.
For me, texting is always a preferable way to communicate.
Perhaps a better keyboard, that would be nice.
Given that the telephone was invented >100 years ago and and faxing earlier than that and both are still going strong, I doubt any person-to-person communication system will ever disappear. Voice calls, texts, emails, faxes, etc will continue to exist. Today, we would be amazed to see the technology involved in any of those communications but, if history is any guide, the basic method will remain.
I wonder when they’ll invent something that lets us talk into a device and then send the message to a recipient who can then listen to it?
I’ve fiddled about using voice recognition software for 20 years, as well as traditional dictation for a longer period. Bottom line? The technology is not the problem – it is at the point that after training it to my voice and loading it with my profession’s vocabulary, I can produce simple stuff by voice recognition almost as quickly as by typing. I can see how for short, simple texts that do not take much thought, do not require substantive editing, and do not require privacy, there would be little need for typing, but that leaves out a lot of texts that still require typing.
There you are on a subway, texting with your honey about personal medical, sexual or financial matters. Do you really want your fellow commuters to listen in? Do they really want to have to listen in? Typed texts are private. Voice dictated texts are not.
There you are having a text conversation with a friend on the the differences between abduction, induction and deduction, but your writing process includes structuring and then hopping about the document while you are creating it, so as to communicate your thoughts as effectively as possible. Is it easier for you to give voice commands to make your edits, or easier to type them in? For a person with good keyboard skills, it is faster to command the device through the keyboard than it is to take the time to talk out the instructions.
Until there is a direct brain to device technology that can replace both speaking and typing, I can’t see texting dropping typing.
one case I can think of is if it’s a group, and it’s being done via group texts. But otherwise, yeah, if it’s going to be a long conversation I think a phone call is probably justified.
but it’s interesting to me how as other forms of communication have emerged, as time goes on I view phone calls as more and more of a nuisance. to me, calling someone is basically demanding their attention right now so it better be for something truly urgent.
I’ve had running email conversations with a friend in another state that go for dozens of messages at a time, talking about nothing in particular. I can only imagine we’d do the same via text if our jobs didn’t have us going overseas from time to time. My wife and I do a large portion of our communication via Facebook messenger (so effectively the same as texting, except we can do it on our computers as well as our phones).
The asynchronous nature of it can’t be oversold, it’s a big part of how it works. I can throw out a few of my thoughts in the middle of the day three or fifteen time zones away assured that it won’t disturb my wife if she’s sleeping or driving or working or whatever have you that might prevent her from wanting her phone to go off.
Plus, another factor against voice-typing: If you’re in a crowded place, how are you going to get everyone else on the subway car or in the restaurant to shut up for a minute so you can send your message without it getting garbled?
And more of a tangent than anything, someone mentioned sending telegrams. That’s actually still around in some corners, particularly ham radio (although in their case, the telegrams are sent via radio signal instead of over wires, but that’s no more of a change than going from landline phones to cellular phones). Admittedly it’s not that common anymore, but it has some very particular advantages over other methods of radio communication.
Texting uses what was an obsolete control channel on the first generation of cell phones. It’s likely the underlying tech will change and voice-driven tools will become more prominent, but to say we won’t be sending each other short written messages is like assuming audiobooks would displace printed (or even e-) books. The speed, nuance and precision of even a dozen written words will never be obsolete - especially when silent communication is needed.
There is a need out there for integration. The need for voice (and for sound in general) is not going to go away. Text is not going to go away. Imagery is not going to go away. Organization of data, retention of data (be it voice/sound, text/imagery or some combination thereof), manipulation/editing, and cross-platform use of data is not going to go away.
In short, thar be a bucket load of ways to produce data, transmit/receive, store/retrieve, and manipulate/edit data. Something that we are very weak on presently is integration of the many ways and means. I expect that there will be significant advances in this over the next couple of decades.
That’s why historically there has been a tendency to bundle speech recognition, optical character recognition and data organization programs (for example, have a look at the history of Nuance). Now the cloud has been added into the mix to make it easier to exchange and maintain data without having to be tied to a particular physical location or a particular physical device (for example, have a look at the history of Microsoft’s Office 365), but even with this, there is still a huge problem of various products not playing well in the sandbox with each other (Apple, I’m looking at you).
My guess is that the movement in the next couple of decades will be to make creation, transmission/reception, storage/retrieval and manipulation/editing of data seamless, rather than the labyrinth of locked doors and dead ends that we are stumbling through today.
Presently, much of the industry is focused on coming up with the next killer app and hoping that everyone will hop on board without adequately recognizing that there will never be homogeneity, but I expect that in the next few years there will be a lot of movement toward meeting the deeper need to make it possible for the many kids in the sandbox to play together.
Sure it will exist, for backward compatibility reasons. Whether anyone will use it or whether we all will have transitioned to richer app platforms remain to be seen but there will be billing software and notification services and internal corporate apps that were built to send text messages and nobody has bothered to change the code in 20 years and so all of our phones and communication devices will still support the protocol out of sheer necessity.
“WE” won’t be communicating in 20 years because a lot of us will be deceased, which means we have returned to the status of “being unborn”.
However, for those who ARE here to communicate we will do it seamlessly. A current example : look at how buzzards find cairn, how male animals can travel right to a female animal “in season”. (dogs, wolves, deer, bear, etc etc etc). Those things occur because of smell. We won’t use “smell”. We will use thought channels. My thought channels will be syncronized with those of my family and friends.
Radio broadcasting stations send out signals which are turned into audible voice and music by receivers called radios… There will come a time when mom and dad will send out thought waves which will be received by their family members. A thought will pop into little Mary’s head and it will be a message from her mom. The husband will suddenly have a thought and it will be a message from his wife.
Each person will wear a “sender and receiver” on a chain around his/her neck. He will push a button on the sender and the message will immediately appear in the receiver’s mind. There will be a button which will turn off incoming messages and save them to await a time when the receiver’s mind will be free to address new messages.
My daughter find it easier to text me b/c I am hard of hearing , I would rather
communicate the old fashion way ,by phone. Texting is great for deaf and hoh people , this is one of best things that can a long for people who can’t hear on a phone.
Well, how much did they change in the last 10 years? (As it happens, the iPhone came out about 9 and a half years ago). I imagine that we’ll still have phones, although the form factor might be different. Voice and text seems like the basic features for the phone to come with regardless of form factor.
Every time this happens, it’s the usual suspects with their “hurr durr why not just make a phone call?” and we always patiently explain the many times where phone calls aren’t any where close to as convenient such as: on a train, in an area with poor cell reception, in a noisy environment, no time for the small talk that is usually part of a phone conversation, at work and you don’t want your co-workers to hear the details and many, many more. Yes, there are many situations where a phone call is preferable but that isn’t all of them. Do you really think that nearly everyone I know from my 14 year old niece to my 80+ year old parents prefer to text sometimes because they prefer to be impersonal and less efficient?
Exactly. Maybe someone can explain to us how much the computer on your desk has changed since 1997 when we were running Windows 95. Would a Windows 10 PC be unrecognizable and surprising to those people from back in the ancient days before Y2K?
Why would you assume that? Regular landline phones have been around for more than a century, same with cars, televisions for maybe 60 years, etc…
A new technology replacing cell phones might emerge soon but cell phones might as well be in widespread use in 2150. I certainly expect them to be still around in 20 years, at least. What could potentially replace them in the short term? Brain implants?
Me. I find writing a text to be a pain in the ass. I prefer to call, it’s easier, quicker and you can ask for as much clarifications as needed immediately.
Why people are so enthralled with texts, and even why they find them more convenient than calling totally eludes me.
