Keyholes. In car doors, at least. I can’t remember the last time I put a key in a car door.
And there always will be, those are components on high end guitar amplifiers.
I hope the phone book goes away. We get somewhere around 12 of them a year dropped off on our porch, and I just recycle them, but really it would be better if they didn’t consume all that paper in the first place. If there has to be one, that’s one business that I’m fine with there being a monopoly on.
I expect in my lifetime that the US Postal Service will become a minor government office on par with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Yes, it is too much to hope. Our reliance on fossil fuels is far more pervasive than just fueling up your car. Petroleum products are the basis for the plastics industry, and for most products of the chemistry industry. Also, as the cost per barrel of oil creeps up, we’re getting closer and closer to the point where it’ll be profitable to exploit oil shale reserves. And that’s easier realized than hydrogen fuel cells.
I, too, fear a lot of animal species are going to go extinct in my lifetime. Heck, at this point in time the amur leopard and white rhino might be beyond the point of recovery, and I’m thinking that the gorilla, bengal tiger, polar bear, and panda may be soon to follow.
I’d like to see smoking go away; too many relatives and people I know have had lung cancer and emphysema. There’s more and more legislation in the US restricting it, and public smoking is probably a thing of the past. But the power of an addiction coupled with the $ of the tobacco industry is just too much to overcome, methinks.
My boyfriend is actually opening a film photography store. They’re going to sell vintage cameras, darkroom time, lessons, etc.
Whether he succeeds or not, film photography has clearly become something for the hobbyist, like fencing and embroidery and woodworking with planes and hand drills.
Albums may already be a thing of the past. They are certainly heading that way.
My youngest nieces have become big Pink Floyd fans recently. When I asked the younger one what her favorite albums were, she looked at me like I had two heads, then named off a few songs. I had to explain that the songs she liked were just parts of a longer story, and that they were meant to be listened to in an exact sequence with a bunch more songs. She thought that the entire concept was “weird.”
No - some of it floats. The rest of it is on land and we’re pretty screwed if it goes. I expect it to go in my lifetime. I expect the Antarctic cap to go too.
If the antartic cap goes maybe we’ll finally find Atlantis or the aliens. 
Seriously though I think paper newspapers may not last into the next century with internet subscriptions being as popular as they are now.
The concept of a long-distance call. Cell phones don’t charge extra for them, and ISTM that landline companies are moving in the same direction.
Typewriters.
Pagers.
Stores dedicated to computers. Stores will still sell computers, but they will also sell TVs, stereos, and other stuff, like Best Buy, not dedicated computer stores like the late CompUSA (are there any left now that CompUSA is gone?).
Paper bills and bank statements sent through the mail. We’ve already pretty much seen the end of canceled checks.
I hope I see the end of pet stores that sell cats and dogs. They certainly seem much less common now than they were when I was growing up.
I think we will see the end of smoking in restaurants. I have seen that in two states where I’ve lived (Maryland and California- well, California did it before I moved out there), and I think I will see it here in Pennsylvania too. This is all good for me, since I’m allergic to cigarette smoke.
But what will people do then when the battery in the door-opener doohickey dies on them, as mine did at the grocery store on Sunday? I can’t remember the last time I opened my car door with a key before that, but I was sure glad I could in that situation.
No, that’s backwards. Some of our civilizations will be like Atlantis if the Antarctic ice cap (or, worse, the Greenland ice cap) goes.
I agree with you. I read the newspaper online every day. But I recently had Mr. Neville cancel our subscription to the dead-tree version. Part of that has to do with the fact that they threw it out on the sidewalk a long way from our house, we weren’t comfortable going out and getting it without getting dressed first, and then I would have to choose between reading the paper at breakfast or eating breakfast in my nightshirt (I do that because I’m a messy eater, and I don’t want to have to go and change if I get food on my clothes at breakfast). But we get our news online these days, so the paper newspaper was just making more clutter and work for us on recycling day.
I also think that free access to online newspapers may go away. They’ll lose the money they were getting from subscriptions to the paper version, and they have to make up that revenue somehow.
I think that programs like GM’s OnStar will be the future of things like this. Your doohickey dies so you call them on your cell phone and they zap it from space.
More and more I think that your cell phone, which won’t really be just a cell phone anymore, will pretty much be the digital wallet/phone/car keys/etc of the future.
I know this has been done to death, but I’d love to see the demise of user operated cars too. Let the GPS do it and let me drink on my way home from work!
By the end of my lifetime, there will be no one left who actually knows how to use a slide rule for all its functions.
The way things are going, there may be no one left who can do simple arithmetic without a calculator.
Coupons. Store loyalty cards have taken over that niche. You hardly ever see anybody with coupons at grocery stores these days.
Paper timesheets.
The ban on using cell phones on planes, and those phones on the backs of airline seats.
Paper maps, at least the folding kind. They’re being replaced by more durable and easier-to-fold laminated maps, books of maps like the Thomas Bros maps, and GPS.
Photo albums. People will have their photo albums on the computer or on an online share, and will only print them out for scrapbooks and things like that. I see scrapbooks sticking around, but not photo albums.
Oooooh, I hope this happens too! We could keep some tracks around for the people who like to drive. But take the drivers out of the daily grind of the commute. Have GPS-driven cars that won’t slow down to rubberneck.
But there’s no way the current model of “owning” certain files, and if you lose the media that file is stored on, you’ve lost the file, is going to continue.
The future of music is the celestial jukebox. Everything ever recorded since Thomas Edison, available for free, any time, any where, any fidelity, any format, on any device. We’ll pay for music, but it won’t be pay-per-listen or pay-per-copy, it will be a usage fee for unlimited access to all media. There might be exceptions, pay per view for certain time-sensitive live mega-events might still exist, where you’re paying not so much for the event, but because you want to see it live. But anyone willing to wait a couple of days will be able to see/hear the event for free, because anyone could record it and distribute it later.
The idea that if you drop your music player in the washing machine and lose all your music will be nonsensical. That music player might have lots of music cached on it, but not stored permanently. If you want to listen to something, you tell your player to play it, and the player finds it out there on the internet and plays it for you. And your player tries to predict what sorts of things you’re likely to ask it to play, so it can cache them for smoother performance. Smashing your player might be an annoyance if you’re on a hiking trip in the Canadian Rockies, but if you’re at home you’ll have a hundred other devices that can act as players, even if they’re not your favorite, and you’ll be able to get a new copy of your favorite player for a few bucks tomorrow.
Oh, sure, there will be people who obsessively “collect” vast databases of music files. And this will be what most normal people connect to when they want to listen to music, someone somewhere has that ancient Jack Johnson track on their server, and if someone somewhere wants to listen to it, all they need is a player capable of finding and connecting to the server and streaming the music.
Along that line, I’d like to see the same thing happen on a set top box for the television too. Any movie or show or concert etc available on demand as it becomes available for one limited access price per month, tiered out as the companies see it needed. No need for on site storage as everything will be streamed from centralized locations so if I want to watch Soap tonight, boom. There it is.
I think that it’s more likely that all your media will be stored by a company like google, so that you don’t need to worry about a hard drive crashing.
Radio will probably have to go digital, not satellite, but digital. I don’t know if radio takes up the bandwidth that TV does, though, so it might not be necessary, but they’re already moving in that direction, anyway.
I think that CD’s and DVDs are good guesses. It’s funny to think that CD’s will be outlived by vinyl, just because the CD is completely copyable on a hard drive.
A lot of us (anyone here who was born before 1977) have seen the eradication of smallpox in the wild.
I hope to see the end of polio as well.
Now we’re seeing the end of chickenpox as a routine childhood disease.
Actually, you suspect what is right, but for the wrong reason. Within my lifetime, “broadcast radio” will cease to exist as we move to webstreaming and out from under FCC control altogether. As web-enabled wireless technology improves, we’ll move our content off the airwaves and into the webstream. We already have the studios, the sales crew, the content and the talent – only the delivery system will change. Once the giant transmitters go dark, the government will lose its grip on our technology and our content. The possibilities for audience growth then is mind-boggling.
I used to think the fax machine, but now I know I was wrong. The fax machine will outlast civilization.
No, you’re probably right. I wasn’t 100% sure that Gaudere was the correct name.
Wristwatches. (And I’m surprised to be the first one to mention this.)
Everyone these days has a cell phone or PDA with the time displayed on it. I don’t wear a wristwatch anymore, nor do I see myself ever doing so again. I used to wear one every day.
No way. This is like saying that necklaces will go out of style. I didn’t wear a watch for many years, but just started wearing one again, partly because it helps me tell time, mostly because it’s a nice piece of jewelry my wife bought me. I have a modern pocketwatch, too, for formal occasions, but the battery died and I haven’t gotten around to getting it replaced.