i’m talking about things we use without a second thought that might seem utterly ridiculous or inefficient in 50-100 years. like landlines or vhs players seemed to us. what’s your pick?
i’m talking about things we use without a second thought that might seem utterly ridiculous or inefficient in 50-100 years. like landlines or vhs players seemed to us. what’s your pick?
I think you are totally wrong about all of these except the dentistry (and for that I simply don’t know enough).
Analog clocks are not going away. They’re aesthetically pleasing, all the luxury watches are analog, all the smart watches have analog modes… I don’t think this is changing any time soon. One caveat: I hear there’s a trend where younger people (e.g. today’s teens and younger) often don’t know how to read analog clocks. So perhaps I can be convinced on this, but I still think they’re here to stay.
Flashlights produce orders of magnitude more light than any smartphone. Headlamps provide light while keeping your hands free. Phone flashlights are useful in a pinch but flashlights are not ever going to seem alien, they might be more niche but not strange. In any event, this has already happened so you’re describing the present, not the future.
Keys? No way. Every electronic locking system includes a mechanical backup for a reason: power outages happen, batteries don’t last forever, and electronics fail a lot more often than mechanical lock mechanisms. None of these facts will change. People don’t really like being locked out of their home then the power’s out, so you bet they’ll keep carrying keys.
Fax machines are already out. A story made the rounds maybe a year or two ago about how Japan was finally going to stop using faxes, and before that Japan was one of the few (if not the last) to still be using fax. So again this is the present, not the future.
Lastly, dentistry: man I hope that happens, it sounds great. But it doesn’t really fit the question, it’s not something we “use” every day, it’s a treatment to a medical problem. Advances in medicine aren’t they here IMO.
Flashlights can definitely put out a lot more light (and store more power) than a cell phone light, but for a lot of close-up stuff, the cell phone is fine.
I’m skeptical that flashlights will go away, as @RegularJoe@lemmy.world is proposing. But I do think that smartphones are a partial replacement.
In urban areas, I don’t need a bright flashlight much, because there’s fixed lighting all over, but in more rural areas, if you’re outside at night and walking around, you do tend to need a flashlight.
I also don’t know how much more change there will be. Like, people already have smartphones pretty much everywhere. I think that most of the replacement that will happen has probably already happened.