They say bananas might not last.
link
Printed dictionaries and encyclopedias.
Or have we already lost printed encyclopedias?
That’s just one variety of banana. There will be plenty of others, and the sooner the better. We’ll look back on the days when we had only Cavendish bananas like we look back on the days of Red Delicious apples, and wonder what the hell we were thinking.
I’ll be surprised if we ever come up with a portable, flexible keyboard that actually works. God help us if we really go to the voice activated stuff. We may come up with a new way to input information though. That wouldn’t surprise me.
Interesting though that the new iPhone is also a video phone if you want. I could see that that would be useful in some circumstances. What’s gonna really suck is that folks are going to walk around basically on speaker phone, so now we get to hear both sides of the conversation. On the plus side, we can comment on how good somebody looks in their bathrobe (kidding).
I suspect the common house/door key will be gone. It’s already on the way out.
Paperback books will be a rarity. It they exist at all, they will be really, really expensive.
Asphalt shingles and the standard roofing materials that we see today will be gone and replaced with photovoltaic roofing material. I hope that happens in 20 years or so.
My Grandmother was born in 1899. She left us in 1998. What a trip she took. ‘What a long strange trip it’s been’ indeed.
I was born in 1960 it’s gonna be a hell of a ride.
Except that with my phone chained to the desk, if I’m not there to answer it during business hours, someone else does. And that call will be routed to someone who can handle the call in my absence.
People only know their own experiences. Someone mentioned being able to check your work and personal email from the same computer- I can’t. My employer blocks webmail access and I can’t access my work email from any device other than my employer’s thin client or the Blackberry they issued me. ( and they are not issued to all employees) In both of my work locations, all sorts of devices are prohibited are prohibited for security reasons- no cell phones, no iPods, no laptops, no cameras of any kind. There are any number of businesses where phone numbers are not tied to particular people, and while most of them may be able to go to wireless phones, they will not be able to use portable phones. And portability is the only real advantage of wireless phones.
Yeah, pretty much all printed reference books will disappear and pretty much already have. I have to be online to use them, but I have wikipedia, the yellow pages, white pages, a map of the entire US and several other good reference materials on my ipod touch. With advances in memory I won’t even need to be online to use those within 10 years.
If we get augmented reality up and going (which we should) that may drastically cut the demand for skilled labor for electricians, plumbers, auto mechanics, HVAC technicians, etc. So those jobs could largely disappear the way phone operators have.
Uh, what’s augmented reality?
The line of thinking is: jobs are being downsized, automated, outsourced, teleconferenced, performed remotely, etc. The days might be coming to a close when a company needs a 75 story monolith to house its thousands of worker-bees. I’ve gotten the impression through talking to my father in law that his company doesn’t want him to come to the office every day, or even at all, perhaps, but he goes in anyway because he’s “old school.” There hasn’t exactly been a mad-rush to rebuild the WTC, and the one in Chicago that’s supposed to be taller than Sears has been on hold for a few years. Local gossip holds that Trump has wanted to build a skyscraper here for years, but the city council keeps turning it down because they don’t think he can fill it (counter-rumor says we don’t have any because the airport is too close to downtown.)
I think the ~30 story apartment building will thrive. I doubt the ability of the 60+ story office building to do so.
That’s when you project computer imagery over the real world; adding to it, instead of replacing the real world entirely like with virtual reality.
I think non-electronic paper will be largely gone out of utilitarian daily use and will be restricted to a few high-end decorative products. So in addition to the paperless office, there will be no paper cash or paper newspapers/magazines. The technology for all this should be ready by the end of the decade and factor in a few more decades for social and political inertia and you still have plenty of time before the end of the century.
The “as we know it” is a bit of a cop-out. Very few products will remain as we know them for another 90 years. So of course television is going to change a lot but I suspect the basic experience of people sitting down and watching some kind of audio-visual entertainment on a screen will remain.
What Der Trihs said, for more info and examples:
And for speculative uses of the technology you should check the Anime Series Denno Coil.
I think in the near term, cable box/DVRs, game consoles, and PCs will more or less converge. You already see it with things like Netflix on Xboxes and Playstations, and with games on cable boxes, and the various sites like hulu on your PC. Eventually, there will be so much overlap between the functionality of all 3 items, that they’ll be competitors. This will be accelerated if services like Uverse and other similar offerings where your tv, voice and internet are all over local loop fiber become ubiquitous. In that case, there’s not much to distinguish the appliances from each other.
I don’t see land-line telephones going away, at least not in concept. What’ll happen is that “telephone” service as it works now won’t exist. We’ll have that local loop fiber, and a VoIP phone connected. That’s what many companies already do with VoIP phones and internet connections.
Newspapers aren’t going to go away fast; what’ll happen is that somebody will happen on a business model that allows them to make money on the web, and then you’ll see newspaper/broadcast news/web news consolidations once people realize that they’re selling news data and that the delivery channel is more or less irrelevant. They’ll still print a limited number of papers for things like hotels, airports, elderly people, etc… but broadcast and web delivery will become the norm.
I suspect that sites like Flickr, etc… will become more important as things move to a more distributed computing model. People won’t store their stuff on local hard drives, and they’ll access it from their phones, laptops, pad computers, home computing appliance, etc…
How is augmented reality going to fix my pipes? 
I expect computers to become mostly invisible and perhaps surgically embedded. Most of the input will be spoken and and you will have a eyepiece for display. We are already most of the way there. All this will happen before 2050. After that, you are on the other side of the singularity as far as I’m concerned.
I have reservations about skyscrapers being more common. They don’t make economic sense, except in places that price real estate by the square foot. They will continue to be built as ego projects, but most companies will figure out there are cheaper places to do business. The trouble is that the taller the building, the more that gets tied up in infrastructure. It can make sense to make a building big, like the Pentagon, but tall, not so much. The current trend seems to be for campus style layouts with a bunch of building clustered together, but none over ten stories.
So if you’re not at your desk, and your phone rings, your neighbor at the next desk picks it up? Weird.
Well, of course your employer can set things up so whoever is on duty will get calls routed to them. If you want to set up a phone in the middle of the office, and say that whoever is closest should answer the phone, then go ahead. It just won’t be a typical use of the phone. If you’re imagining general reception-type duties, you have a “main desk” number, and whoever is on duty gets those calls routed to them. It will certainly be possible to have an office phone that’s locked to a particular location and specify that anyone present at that location is supposed to answer that call. It’s just likely that the “phone” will really be a work station getting VOIP rather than a landline.
But if for some reason it’s really important to exactly mimic phone service as of 1973, you’ll be able to do that. The question is why you’d want to. I’m sure plenty of employers have work flows that assume POTS and won’t allow anything else. But after a while the managers who dream up these work flows will retire, and kids who grew up with mobile phones will be the managers and they’ll expect things to work in a way they are comfortable with, not the way their grandparents expected.
Theoretically it’ll be a DIY manual that overlaps with your vision and hearing, giving people more power to repair devices around the house.
Computers already are mostly invisible. 90 - 95% of the computers in your house are buried inside of things.
It depends on the prices of transportation. The suburban office complexes you mention came about because of cheap gas and good roads. If gas is expensive and public transport is more used we’ll go back to people living relatively near work in high density mixed business and residence areas - just like Manhattan.
Not weird at all - although it is generally my secretary who answers , not a neighbor, and she will then send it to whoever should handle that type of call on my absence. It just means that you and I are in very different lines of work. I imagine that none of your coworkers can handle your phone calls, while most of my calls can be handled by any of the professional staff. I also suspect that you don’t get a lot of phone calls regarding issues that can’t wait until you return to work, while I do.
I’m sure that it would be possible to have wireless phones chained to a desk, and perhaps even allow a person at one phone to pull a call from another. I’m also sure I could set up a voice mail message advising callers to make a second call to a different number if they need immediate assistance - although I suspect the need for a second call is precisely why we don’t currently have voice mail. I’m just not sure why my employer or any other would want to switch from a wired system to wireless if they don’t want or need the portability. As far as I can tell, once the infrastructure is in place, the only advantage to wireless phones, internet or anything else is portability. Right know, any business that wishes to is free to eliminate their landlines and simply issue all of the employees cell phones to be used for business calls. Yet they haven’t, and it’s not because the old folks are afraid of mobile phones. It is because there is always a cost to change and the benefits of mobile service don’t outweigh those costs. That will probably be the case until and unless the phone and cable companies pull down their wires- which they won’t do as long as there is enough demand for wired service. And they will almost certainly never switch to VoIP unless the day comes when network and electrical service is more reliable than it is now. I’ve encountered infrequent power outages and much more frequent network outages , but at least the phones were still working.
Apparently we can augment us a batch if it comes down to it. 