Desk
Computer (Small, about the size of a baseball)
Digital or holographic pictures
anything else?
Hoverphones.
No computer on your desk.
Your phone will be your computer.
You might have some specialized input and display devices on your desk, but the computer itself will be hidden away, either in your phone, or somewhere else out of sight.
There won’t be offices 50 years from now for the most part. Virtual presence will be good enough that they won’t be needed for dealing with information. People will be physically present in labs and factories. A conference call I’m on every week includes people scattered all over the country - plus the originator of the call who is on a houseboat on a canal somewhere in Germany.
Fax machines will still be in use, though, for some reason.
In Alan Dean Foster’s book Sentenced to Prism , the CEO’s suit contains all the functions of the items you would have found on a desk.
My company logo on some ubiquitous new product.
A mimeograph machine, a slide rule, a Corona typewriter, a quill pen, a letter-opener, two reams of the finest vellum, a manservant who is of good naturall parts but very colerique, etc
Feeding tubes.
No less paper than we have on our desks today.
Paperless office, hah!
Orgasmatron (under the desk, of course).
There won’t be any offices, far sooner than 50 years from now.
Monkubines!
But there will be . . . Rollerball.
A little known fact is that the fax machine was invented in 1843 well before the Civil War and the invention of the telephone (I am not kidding). That makes 166 years or the majority of time that the U.S. has been a country. It probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
That, plus cubicle farms, where people will be given the latest gadgets but the restrictions on using them will be along the lines of “here, have a holobracelet, but you’re only allowed to use it in 2D.”
I’ve worked in environments like the one Voyager describes, and in others where people just wouldn’t believe multinational teleconferences exist and are cheaper (using IM or VoIP) than the phone. There’s multinational companies where the bosses pretty much live at the airport. Since that’s linked to mindset and not to actual needs, and since the mindset isn’t going anywhere, cubicle farms will go on existing.
There’s jobs where it simply doesn’t make any sense to have people come in; there’s people, and therefore companies, which refuse to understand this. Hal Briston is one of our Dopers who work in IT from their homes; me, I’ve had several jobs in IT support, working for people that I’d never met and would never meet; in one of them I’d be having perhaps two face-to-face meetings per week with the rest of my team, I could go for days without having to talk with anybody at the office… yet I still needed to come in. We were issued company laptops but then it was forbidden to use them from home without special permission, which could not be given as a “blanket” statement (i.e., no “this person can work from home,” if you’d have to do it on a Saturday and Sunday, permission had to be requested and granted for each day separatedly, and the permission process involved five steps, three of which were committees).
Not me!
No more “office”, I’m afraid. Our fortune 500 state sales office emptied out, literally over 6 months. They bought everyone a laptop and cell phone and told them the office was just for meetings and research, and using things like the color copier/printer. They no longer had a private desk but had to take one that was available. Three quarters of the space was walled off and rented to another company.
Or participate in meetings from the airport. I’ve done that - also on light rail from downtown Portland to the airport. Mostly listen only, so I wasn’t obnoxious (much.)
The reason we did this was real estate costs. Some of our facilities don’t give people offices - you check out a little office on a week by week basis, and have all your stuff in a cart. We use thin clients so even if you don’t use a laptop you can login from anywhere in the company (around the world) and have your session immediately present. Anyhow, the idea is that a fair percentage of offices are vacant on any given day, so doing this, and encouraging work from home, reduces the need for space, which is expensive in Silicon Valley. I work in a group that gets real offices, but the system was still great when my wife was sick, since it let me work from home for a period and still be reasonably productive.
It’s going to take time, but in 50 years it should be pretty standard.
Our salesmen got kicked out first. I think the theory is that a sales guy sitting in the office isn’t selling, and thus should be kicked out and put on the road.