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 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