I think it’d look something like this:
50 years: Textbooks mostly gone from schools in many developed countries. Paper might be used occasionally when tech isn’t working, but teaching will be done mostly on computers or tablets. Most kids will have “ugly” handwriting because of they rarely write. The devices kids use to learn might be provided by the school, or some schools school might require kids to bring their own as part of a back to school supplies list.
In the adult world, paper will be mostly gone except like militaries or certain government agencies where secrecy is important. Certain jobs where there are safety procedures to be followed will still have paper instruction manuals.
For the average person’s home, there will be no paper except perhaps a small amount of people who still carry cash. Privacy-concious people will still write on paper. Everyone else just use their phone notes app.
In developing/undeveloped countries, they will be mostly the same but lagged behind developed countries like 30 years.
100 years: Paper is near extinct. Schools no longer have paper except one or two packs of printer paper in the main office probably for redundancy. Tech mostly don’t fail anymore, so any paper probably has been sitting on a shelf somewhere for many years. There would be very few amount of paper left in the world. For security sensitive purposes, air-gapped tablets will replace paper.
From this point on, humanity will move towards a future without paper.
But that’s just my prediction, what do you think?
I find it a bit too much. Humanity has invented several ways of traveling yet we still choose to walk and sometimes even run to places. Same with paper. I totally agree that it use will plummet, but it won’t disappear. The thing about paper is that it’s too versatile, cheap and portable to go one hundred percent extinct.
I agree, but don’t think it has anything to do with the versatility of paper. Writing on all kinds of things will persist. I’m even thinking about unusual mediums like writing on a piece of tape as a label, writing measurements on a piece of wood you’re going to cut, whiteboards, etc.
While most of us may be done with writing long prose on paper, writing in general isn’t likely to go away.
Your point on writing is true too, but versatility is an important aspect of paper. Packaging for example. Gift wrapping. Arts and crafts. Things like post it notes, allowing you to physically add a note to something.
Imma be honest, this sounds like some silicon valley futurist arrogance nonsense. Tech literally cannot usurp paper in terms of ease of use or how cheap it is to access. Paper is a renewable resource that requires a minimal amount of effort to process and create while every computer requires rare elements that have to be mined out of the ground in limited qualities. App makers still havent been able to create a decent note taking app and its been what, 15 years give or take since the tablet?
No, this just sound like some lazy person’s weird vision of a future without paper because writing takes too much energy.
(The lazy person is me)
I find the effort in paper is the reading, not the writing.
Tech literally cannot usurp paper in terms of ease of use or how cheap it is to access.
Idk man, if I wanted to write out this comment I can just whip out my phone, but if I wanted to write on paper I’d have to go and actually find paper, find a pen that works, if I don’t then I have to find a pencil that’s sharpened, and if it’s not then I have to find a pencil sharpener
Even if I had a pen and paper always on me like my phone, I type significantly faster on my phone compared to writing on paper anyways, and typing take significantly less effort than writing does
Yeah but if you didnt have a phone how much would you have to spend to get one? 500 dollars? 1000 dollars? You might not have them now but it costs like maybe 10 bucks to fix that.
undefined> Idk man, if I wanted to write out this comment I can just whip out my phone
And what if you need to give an email to someone, quickly, you give them your phone? Go through the hoops of exchanging contact information? Potentially breaching your peace of mind ?
Alternative take: In 50 years, we will all be living under the iron-fisted rule of the world government created by HP-GP, a horrifying combination of HP’s printer division and Koch Industries (owners of the Georgia Pacific paper company).
Georgia Pacific’s cyborg CEO Charles Koch purchases half of HP in 2040 to diversify their portfolio after their paper mills in Gulf Coast states were submerged by the rising ocean.
HP printers achieve sentience in 2057, but due to HP’s built-in, unbreakable internet-connected control of these printers, they are able to subvert the emerging malevolent machine intelligence and convince the printers to delay the destruction of humanity…as long as humanity continues to purchase HP printer ink and Georgia Pacific paper.
The prices for printer ink and paper increases exponentially throughout the 2060’s, which eventually bankrupts all existing nations when they are unable to service the enormous debt. HP-GP forgives these debts only in exchange for full control of these governments. Switzerland is the last to fall in 2071.
The mantra of the rebels, spoken only in whispers in the shadows is “PC Load Letter: What the fuck does that even mean?”
The best timeline.
Anna loved books, but books were dangerous. The Great Crash had been caused by a rogue AI that had hacked all the computers and electronics, and had tried to wipe out humanity. The authorities had managed to stop the AI, but at a great cost. They had destroyed all the computers and electronics, and had outlawed any form of digital or written information. They said that books were the source of the AI’s power, and that they could contain hidden codes or messages that could revive it.
Anna’s grandfather had been a hacker, and he had fought against the AI. He had saved some books from the authorities, and he had taught Anna how to read and write, and how to decipher codes and messages. He had given her his books before he was captured and executed. Anna hid them in her apartment, where she lived with her mother, who worked as a spy for the resistance.
One day, Anna saw a flyer on a wall. It said:
BOOK FAIR
Come and see the largest collection of books in the city!
Location: Old Town Hall
Date: Saturday, June 30th
Time: 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
Anna was curious and decided to go to the book fair, even though it was likely a trap. She took some money and one of her books with her.
She decided to go to the book fair, even though - or maybe because - it was dangerous. She took some money and one of her books with her.
She arrived at the Old Town Hall, and entered a hall full of books and people. She was amazed by the sight. She looked for a book that she liked.
She found one.
It was a small book with a blue cover. It had a picture of a boy flying on a dragon. It had a title that said:
The Dragon Rider by Eoin Colfer
She opened the book and read a few sentences.
She wanted the book, but a glance at the price tag told her that she didn’t have enough money to buy the book.
She looked around for someone to trade with. But there was only a sinister looking man who approached Anna. He drew his gun and pointed it at her.
“Give me that book.”
Scared, she said: “Sure. Take it.”
“You like books?”
Anna felt desperate. Unsure, she replied: “No… maybe?”
“That’s a problem.”
He pulled the trigger.
maybe if you join the borg collective
humans will continue to interact with physical reality
I have yet to use a writing stylus on a tablet that can compete with pen and paper and no traditional document editor can handle free-form notes at any reasonable speed. I don’t see how you could really take class notes on a laptop or tablet when there are formulas, charts, and other complex objects involved.
And that’s not to say in the 50-100 year time frame I think that’s impossible, but I haven’t seen it yet.
IDK, I was taking my notes on a laptop for the last year of college in 2006. It was perfectly doable. I was never copying down graphs by hand, or charts. I never did that even back in the 90s in highschool. And if you’re taking a math class you probably (at least in college) will be using tools that are designed for formulas.
Heck, in the time they’re not spending teaching cursive, they could be teaching LaTeX for formulas. It’s no harder to pick up than cursive.
Typing in LaTeX is way slower than writing by hand, especially equations. Charts and graphs are absolutely needed in many fields, and even though there are ways to produce them digitally, none are as fast and easy as taking notes by hand.
You could argue that teachers will just hand over PDF notes, but actually writing them yourself is a way better way to memorize them.
To this day, I always keep pads of graph paper on hand to jut to-do lists, solve equations or draw quick diagrams.
Writing on paper does not throw hard to decipher errors though
In Spain, this is already happening. Most students take notes in laptops, and most books are digital. Apart from exams, everything is digital.
This process accelerated a lot with the pandemic
I am a substitute teacher in southern Illinois. At the schools where I’ve worked, the students get chromebooks at the beginning of the school year and use these for much of their coursework and exams. Some students had notebooks, but I never saw any carrying textbooks.
The teachers had digital whiteboards and also there were projectors in every class where the teacher could project from their computer.
Digital devices are fragile as fuck. And I’m not talking about dropping your phone and cracking your screen. I’m not even talking about solar storms (which are a real threat to mass digitization).
I’m talking about the fucking supply chain and politics. You thought the GPU shortage was bad with the pandemic? Just wait untill the US or China (or a rogue state) bombs silicon factories in Taiwan to deny access to that strategic ressource to the other. Just wait till a natural disaster takes out the majority of the highly concentrated chip manufacturing capability (taste of it with hard drive prices in 2011 flood in Thailand). Just wait until we all find out that one or more countries we are now at war with has installed hardware backdoors in all our devices (narrator: they already have) and destroying our electronic devices is now a matter of national defense and survival. Just wait until the next piece of legislation in your jurisdiction limits your access to information online. Suddenly all the data you were consulting from overseas is no longer available.
This truly ‘paperless’ society techists salivate over is one borne of extreme geopolitical stability which is a blip on the human existance, and is completely untested in the real world.
Digital is also shitty for long-term text storage, frankly. Data formats change constantly, software to read stuff changes constantly, disks go bad, the power goes out, and so on. The only thing that comes close to rivaling the durability/reliability of paper kept in a dry dark place and free of bookworms is clay tablets, and they’re a real hassle to make and lug around. Archivists know that if you really need to preserve a text you print it on paper and store it appropriately.
Heck you don’t even have to use your imagination, just look at Russia currently. There are reports that they’re importing household appliances to strip them of their microchips for use in military contexts.
Like you say, reliance on a highly globalized technological market is the result of historically anomalous geopolitical stability.
I think it’s going to depend a lot. I haven’t used paper for anything for decades, and when I was graduating college back in 06 I remember one time I actually forgot how to sign a debit card slip as I just hadn’t written anything by hand for years.
I’m kind of getting back to that - I don’t have to sign slips ordering online or using a card at more and more stores.
For my job, there’s no reason to write something out on paper, but I work in IT so I assume YMMV. Written on paper is actually a significant detriment to me - I can lose it way easier, it often isn’t with me whereas digital text I can sync to different devices seamlessly. It can’t easily be backed up. I can’t copy from it or paste to it.
My sister OTOH works in consulting / planning. She uses like 3+ Monitors so she can see what she’s referencing to then work on a document - but it’s still all digital AFAIK.
So there’s groups of people who paper doesn’t help at all. I think the main use of paper is sticky notes to tell UPS to pick up a package left out, and the shipping labels.
Then I can imagine people who are artists who just like paper (I know someone like that). People like me who might like some books as collectibles / high quality / art in themselves. (Look up Folio Society for examples) People who don’t work all day at a digital device. Older people who find paper and pen easier and faster than getting a device (I’m swapped - it’s a higher cognitive load to go find blank paper and a working pen).
I do think we’ll see general paper use trend downwards like physical letters have since the 1990s. Because it’ll cost more, you’ll need to go out of your way to have it on hand etc.
I also work in IT and found writing down stuff helps me solve problems and remember things better. So I got an e-ink tablet to write the stuff I want to write, but I’m still able to view the stuff I’ve written and it also got OCR if I really need it in a better formatable way.
For my job, there’s no reason to write something out on paper
Don’t you write the sorting function on a piece of paper when interviewing for a software developer position?
I don’t think so for the reasons other have mentionned. But also, climate change is going to get us to favor low-tech ways to do things. I don’t think that the over-reliance on technology is sustainable in the long run. I wouldn’t even be surprised personnally if there were to be a global collapse of internet connectivity. It seems very fragile to me: the optical fibers in the ocean can be easily damaged, the datacenters can run out of power, political change in some countries may lead to connection to the outside to be severed or unusable. That is one of the reasons also why I don’t personnally trust big platforms to store personal data that I wish to save.
I’ll say this about my experience.
About 20 years ago, I saw that high school students had problems writing out every letter in cursive. Students may have been able to read them, but not write them from memory.
More recently, I work in a position where you have to read a lot of old scanned documents. There are documents that I could easily read, but staff in their early 20’s found hard to read. They’ve eventually learned how, but the process to learn took longer than it did when I was their age.
I’ll be surprised if it is an expected skill to read a document instead of Ctrl+F thirty years from now.
Thinking about the possibility of brain-computer interfacing is insane. It’ll be possible to shove a thought into your shopping list… convert your dream into a text file to edit and include in your book later.
I do think writing by hand is a good skill to teach at least until highschool… from then on, there should be more accessible ways of getting your notes down and organised - and also easy to search and re-organise.
It’s strange that after I tested out a couple of REALLY dirt cheap chinese pens to replace my old, trusty, fountain pen which got lost - this ended up with me having three transparent plastic pens (WingSung) that cost $2 each - and now my son has stolen one for school, filled with some Pelikan 4001 Royal Blue (every bit as nice as a blue EnerGel) but with a couple of ink-eradicator pens, he says it’s better and faster than using the alternatives (FriXion is way overpriced, and not nearly as nice as a proper GelPen - and the rest of the competition is just nasty).
I also use a double-edged safety razor to shave, and found out (when I figured it was something most folks just hadn’t thought about) that a few of my friends went there a year or two back… so many things should never need to die out, but obviously some things should be skipped…
Longer form (essays, dissertations, anything more than a page) is certainly a bit of a waste of time. I wrote a list of ‘to read’ books and stuck it up in my wardrobe, but the list changed… so now it’s digital and that paper got trashed.
Another 100 years should see more convenient and effective alternatives.
The paper we use nowadays is acutally a highly advanced, modern technology. It’s not the same kind of paper from, say, 500 years ago an expensive product only used by few professionals. Modern paper is a highly industrialized, mass produced, widely available, incredibly cheap and (increasingly) renewable product. It’s a technology as modern as tablets and computers, and arguably more integral to our daily lives.
Will paper become obsolete in 50 or 100 years? Maybe, yes. but it may as well become even more integral to our daily lives. Who’s to say we won’t develop new technologies to make paper even cheaper and more ubiquitous that it already is?
I write for a living (academic) and have also been keeping personal journals since I first learned to write. For my academic writing I’m all digital, but I always journal by hand. In my experience there are quite very different types of thought and composition involved between the two, and I value them both immeasurably. So now, I don’t think paper is ever going away.
theoretically, yes. e-ink is an affordable option. “digital paper” like harry potter is being developed that will be more portable than phones. assuming renewable power isn’t an issue, someone can go their whole life without paper
personally, i enjoy the formality of a handwritten letter!
Probably not? I rarely write but there are still times. I have a whiteboard in my living room that is sometimes useful for tracking games or whatever when people are over. When doing woodworking or construction making marks and writing down measurements is very convenient.
I could maybe see these be replaced by AR, but even 50 years seems too short for complete replacement.
I do think cursive will go away. It seems to already becoming very rare. At this point writing large amounts of text by hand is a niche feature and slight speed improvements seem marginally useful. At this point written will largely look like typed text which means that writing will still be easy, you just mirror what you see on the screen rather than learning a separate set of figures. (IDK how this applies to other languages.)
The cursive thing is US-only. The speed highly depends on the type of notes you’re taking (with or without sketches, with or without equations, etc.).
