I'd say traditional (linear) television. Still common enough, though even today it's clearly on the way out.
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With the advancement in technology, I'm sure in 20 years augmented reality will really kick off. I'm sure they will wonder why people used to play with controllers and not a VR headset... I might be watching too much SAO and I don't even watch that anime.
Nah, I can't see VR ever going so completely mainstream that it replaces a normal screen and controller.
It is just not convenient enough.
Wiping our asses with PAPER.
Nope, I can't see this happening either, unless bides take over.
Toilet paper is actually rather effective, it is cheap, easily processed, effective enough at removing most of the crap, it does not require added water infrastructure (I would not clean my ass with grey water) and simple to teach new users
Long live the three seashells
Chad
I wonder if more people will go back to flip phones. Some of my younger church friends are tired of smartphones and the amount of time and energy they suck out of your life and negative energy social media puts into it, and are switching back to flip phones. It's surprising to see young people using them.
I'm not a doctor.
But possibly there will be a better way to treat/cure cancer, and thus chemotherapy will be seen as similar to how we today see bloodletting or lobotomy.
Gasoline-only cars, most likely
Unless something drastic happens, there will be a decent number of cars on the road in 20 years that are already on the road today.
Not in 20 year mate.
Oil has a massive problem, it is just too fucking good at what it does, energy density of a battery is far, far below petrol, and require complex infrastructure at the point of sale, while petrol can even be dispensed without electricity.
20 years though? That's incredibly generous and unlikely imo.
People are refusing to tackle the infrastructure issue of people charging their cars who do not own single family detached homes. It's a significant population of people for which owning an electric vehicle is a huge inconvenience. Public charging stations exist, but take significantly longer than the 2 minutes it takes to pump gas.
The second big thing is that people simply don't replace their cars that often. Might be pulling this out of my ass, but I had read recently that the average person replaces their vehicle every 7-12 years...and it is often not with a brand new vehicle. Considering how electric cars still make a very small percentage of those on the road, I can't see 100% removal of gas vehicles in 20 years in only a few generations of vehicle ownership change.
The Nissan Leaf came out around 15 years ago as the first big name, somewhat popularish electric vehicle. Yet in 2025 electric vehicles are nowhere close to even 50% of vehicles on the road.
In the more distant future? Sure. 20 years ain't happening tho.
But we'll see!
I don't think 17% is "a very small percentage"
And I believe 90% of new cars sold in Norway this year were electric
Remember to discount any stats from the US, they're always at least a decade behind on everything
Even wilder than that will be some form of social compromise in fully-autonomous vehicles.
People won’t want to part with the flexibility of driving their own cars, and once things are standardized and safety records are proven, people will eventually find acceptance in automated vehicles.
I hypothesize that major thoroughfares/highways will be fully-automated and only surface streets will be self-driving. This is a sort of hybrid-solution which generally addresses a great deal of traffic issues.
I bet at least 50 years after autonomous driving works correctly manual driving will be outlawed and only be done by enthusiasts on dedicated race tracks.
Or maybe not outlawed but most people won't have a license. Seeing a normal car might be a similar novelty as seeing a horse carriage.
Nope, autonomous driving will probably evolve into a drive by wire system, where you drive the computer that drives the car, that means that you are kept in a safety bubble where your inputs are validated to be safe by the computer before they are performed.
Similar to that of fighter jets today.
99% agree. We will find it as absurd as considering horse-drawn carriage as a contemporary mode of transport, and while legal overall, their use is prohibited on interstate highways, as will be manually-driven vehicles. And we might not even have to wait 50 years!
As many people as there are who won't want to hand over control to the car computer for various reasons, there are A LOT of people who would rather be on their phones than drive (many of whom currently try to do both simultaneously 😬)
There are parallels to when autopilot first began to proliferate in aviation. I’d have to do some research to confirm, but I am certain there was at least a segment of people who would have said they trusted pilots to fly more than autopilot. Now it’s 99% autopilot. The pilots of scheduled air services typically hand control to autopilot fairly shortly after departure, and for quite a long time before arrival. In some cases there are even autopilot-coupled approach to landings… and nobody bats an eye.
We collectively spend millions of hours in traffic, and lose thousands of lives to preventable accidents (like drowsy/sleepy/influenced driving).
Aviation made the switch to save lives, and eventually drivers will, too.
When we look back, we’ll wonder how we were such savages about insisting we drive manually.
I'm hoping the answer is money.
It won't be, but I can hope.
Do you mean physical money in terms of paper/plastic/coins or money as a concept? If the latter, how would society function?
People probably wouldn't believe we sold water in plastic water bottles or shopped with disposable plastic bags.
I legitimately do not understand why so many people refuse to drink tap water. I get that an occasional bottle of water is convenient when traveling or something, but some of my neighbors seem to only drink bottled water even at home. The city will literally test your water for free if you don't trust it for some reason.
I think it might take a lot longer than 20 years for plastic to fully die down
Where I live, plastic bags and styrofoam are already rare now. Now we just have to wait for people to realize water is free.
You should go on street view and check out Asia, whenever I visited Thailand and see a backroad, there is a huge number of used plastic bottles lying next to the road.
They still get drinking water from bottles.
Weather that is the case in large cities like Bangkok I don't know as I haven been there enough to learn.
For most of us in the US: Having an endless supply of cheap, clean fresh water
I'm afraid the answer will be air conditioning and indoor plumbing.
Allowing Israel to get away with shit.
We have to arrange that for wealthy/corps first.
Using plastic to contain food. I'm always a little turned off when a takeout place uses plastic containers as opposed to the paper or foil ones. Plus it's terrible to animals, especially marine life such as dolphins.
Single-use plastic, yeah. Things like Tupperware will stick around unless we go back to using asphalt for food preservation.
I think we're going to see single use wax-paper or similar displace the plastic and Styrofoam for your delivery order.