The other day in The Boston Globe, Alex Beam had a column on predictions of what would become extinct, and when. His source was Australian futurists Richard Watson and Ross Dawson's time line, which is definitely worth a look-see (although it is something of an eye chart).
To get you up to date, privacy is already extinct. (I thought so! All my efforts to avoid using the CVS card so that they can't find out my toothpaste preference are for naught. Actually, I wish they did know my toothpaste preference. Then I could go into a CVS, wave my magic card, and have it tell me that I like Crest Gel with Extra Whitener, Breath Freshener, and Tartar Control - or whatever it is that I use - so that I wouldn't have to spend 35 minutes in the toothpaste aisle reading all those boxes.)
No surprise that manual typewriters are gone, and I, for one, am just as happy. All those flying letters if you didn't strike the keys just right. The jam ups. The Wite-Out and correct-tape. What a pain in the butt....
Also extinct: punch cards, careers (?), milkmen, and Swiss Army Knives. I believe they're wrong about the Swiss Army Knives. And they also have wooden toys as already extinct, but that was before last year's lead-painted, poisoned-plastic, Chinese toy crisis, which gave wooden toys a nice little bounce back.
According to these folks, normal weather is a goner. (I thought so.) As are public intellectuals. (I guess all we get now are talking heads and pundits, who prefer "witty" sparring to thinking.)
What's coming up in terms of extinction?
Ashtrays - no big loss. Land phones - I'll have to warn my husband, the last person in the world to not have a cell phone. Secretaries, which have been pretty much extinct in high tech for a while. And state pensions - which I've long been saying is just a matter of time. Once there are no longer any private sector employees with pensions, there will be zero taxpayer support on their part for pensions for government workers.
Post offices. Libraries.
Ah, how I will miss them, although I hardly ever do go to the library any more....
Telephone directories will become extinct sometime in the next 10 years. Bring it on!
In 2009, they predict that mending things will pass out of existence. Frankly, I think it's pretty much gone already. Other than re-heeling shoes and sewing on buttons, I pretty much just throw out something when it stops working. Seriously, who am I going to find who can repair my 12 year old boom-box that takes forever to pick up the thread of the CD?
Getting lost will be extinct by 2014. For a sense-of-direction-challenged person like myself, this is good news. I have been late to getting a GPS, but it's really just a matter of time.
Retirement will be extinct in 2016. That figures! Just about the time I'll be a candidate for Social Security, there it goes.
I may or may not see the end of glaciers (2037) or the end of peace and quiet (2038), which will make me just as happy to be dead and gone.
Death, by the way, will be extinct at some point in the future.
I will, quite thankfully, miss that. (The older I get, the more I realize that, if we live long enough, we all probably hit a point where we've seen quite enough, thank you. The end of glaciers and peace and quiet will likely do it for me.)
Blogging will be extinct by 2022, which still gives me a few good years worth of posting.
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Interesting, these guys are big proponents of robotic pets, which I posted on here.
Libraries? I don't think so. Transformed, yes, but they seem to be alive and kicking to me. Maybe they're not used to the digerati, but judging by the activity level at my local Houston Public LIbrary branch, they're far from extinct. They do have computers and wifi and all kinds of electronic resources now, though.
ReplyDeleteNow card catalogs, those are extinct.