5 Things from your Childhood you can say Goodbye to Because of Technology
Ask a child (10 years old or younger) what he/she thinks the universal hand sign for ‘call me’ is. We know this gesture as that thing we do with our hand — turning it into a fist with the thumb and little finger stretched out — mimicking the receiver and speaker of a handheld telephone.
But the children of today haven’t grown up around any of these strange things have they? The universal gesture of referring to a phone call for kids today is a smartphone.
Just imagine, a 140 year old technology, made obsolete in just about 10 years, so much so, that the cultural indicators for this technology have also disappeared.
Plenty more of these examples may exist, but that isn’t the intriguing part here. What is infinitely more fascinating is thinking about what aspects of human life today will be made obsolete in the near future.
Without falling into the trap of naïve optimism, let’s look at -
5 Ubiquitous Things from your Childhood you will (Probably) say Goodbye to Soon
Laptops and Personal Computers
I’m sure you all just love your MacBooks, but hear me out.
The ASUS ROG Phone 5 comes with a 144Hz AMOLED screen, two 3,000mAh batteries, the Snapdragon 888 and up to 16GB of RAM. In terms of how it may perform, that’s quite close to the ‘Gaming Laptop’ I am writing this on right now. This phone is definitely leagues ahead of the best $799 gaming laptop from 2017. So if I assume humanity moves forward at the expected rate of technological progress (Intel and AMD, my eyes are on you both…), I should be able to play CyberPunk 2077 and use FL Studio on my phone in just a couple of years, right?
Why even carry around a laptop then. A keyboard, mouse and a display adapter should be all you need. So it’s fair to say that in a few years, (unless you’re an enthusiast or a developer of some sorts), all your computing needs will be satisfied by a tiny little device in your pocket, or even inside your arm, if you’re truly daring.
Libraries
There will always exist a section of people who prefer the touch of paper over something like a Kindle, or a PDF on their phones. However, this section of people is small, and has dwindling numbers. This is because almost nobody has the need to attend a physical library anymore, be it to search for a book, or to buy it on the spot.
The only reason to keep these giant buildings around would be to act as a repository of information, or maybe for the historical novelty of having books around. With books getting easier and easier to scan and convert into digital forms, there is little need to maintain entire rooms filled with books in 2021. Sure, this by no means spells the end of libraries in general, since people will always opt for the cultural novelty of having shelves of books at home. However, commercial libraries (like the ones in your neighborhood that let you borrow books) are essentially obsolete even today, and will probably disappear entirely in the near future.
Mobile Phone Chargers
Smartphones of today will most likely turn into sleek, port-less bricks which have your lives backed up on them. This seems to be the most plausible progression for the devices we have today.
What this entails, is a complete shift to wireless charging as the standard way of juicing up your devices. So expect to have wireless charging tables or platforms in your home, which you will use to charge your devices wirelessly.
Credit Cards/ATMs/Cash in general
Similar to the children on TikTok not knowing what the phone call hand gesture means, children in the near future may also be oblivious to the concept of physical money. Look at the world right now. Even in the third world, where new technology penetrates a while after it does in the West, more and more payments are being made digitally. Citizens throughout the world, irrespective of their socio-economic standing, own a smartphone with an internet connection at the very least. Sure enough, the next foreseeable jump would be to leverage this, and to eliminate cash from circulation entirely.
This would result in some interesting cultural differences between us and kids who will be born a few years from now.
For example, what would ‘making it rain’ mean in the future? Make it rain with what? Cash? What’s that?
Skype
The late 2000s to mid 2010s had one definitive leader in terms of the best platform for video-calling. Microsoft’s Skype had become a mainstay, and was arguably on the fringe of changing the dynamics of video calls in workplaces entirely. However, Skype is notably absent in the market today. One would think that the global pandemic would drive users to adopt this video-conferencing platform since it’s the one that’s been around for the longest. However, Skype has been rendered brutally obsolete in today’s digital space.
Better video-conferencing platforms with better video compression, less latency and affordable subscription fees have now taken over. These platforms have impacted the way in which businesses and workplaces function, and justify their sometimes exorbitant subscription fees.
In contrast, Skype was mostly favored for small scale calls or team meetings, and was never meant to replace human interaction, at least not in the way Zoom, Google Meet and Cisco Webex are designed to do.
The next generation of children will most likely have no idea as to what Skype was, and will forget the significance of this logo.
What’s the ‘S’ stand for?
It’s not an ‘S’. On my world, it means ‘Hope’
Well, here it’s an ‘S’
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