Asklemmy

I find it a bit too much. Humanity has invented several ways of traveling yet we still choose to walk and sometimes even run to places. Same with paper. I totally agree that it use will plummet, but it won't disappear. The thing about paper is that it's too versatile, cheap and portable to go one hundred percent extinct.

Imma be honest, this sounds like some silicon valley futurist arrogance nonsense. Tech literally cannot usurp paper in terms of ease of use or how cheap it is to access. Paper is a renewable resource that requires a minimal amount of effort to process and create while every computer requires rare elements that have to be mined out of the ground in limited qualities. App makers still havent been able to create a decent note taking app and its been what, 15 years give or take since the tablet?

maybe if you join the borg collective

humans will continue to interact with physical reality

Alternative take: In 50 years, we will all be living under the iron-fisted rule of the world government created by HP-GP, a horrifying combination of HP's printer division and Koch Industries (owners of the Georgia Pacific paper company).

Georgia Pacific's cyborg CEO Charles Koch purchases half of HP in 2040 to diversify their portfolio after their paper mills in Gulf Coast states were submerged by the rising ocean.

HP printers achieve sentience in 2057, but due to HP's built-in, unbreakable internet-connected control of these printers, they are able to subvert the emerging malevolent machine intelligence and convince the printers to delay the destruction of humanity...as long as humanity continues to purchase HP printer ink and Georgia Pacific paper.

The prices for printer ink and paper increases exponentially throughout the 2060's, which eventually bankrupts all existing nations when they are unable to service the enormous debt. HP-GP forgives these debts only in exchange for full control of these governments. Switzerland is the last to fall in 2071.

The mantra of the rebels, spoken only in whispers in the shadows is "PC Load Letter: What the fuck does that even mean?"

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.

In Spain, this is already happening. Most students take notes in laptops, and most books are digital. Apart from exams, everything is digital.

This process accelerated a lot with the pandemic

I don't think so for the reasons other have mentionned. But also, climate change is going to get us to favor low-tech ways to do things. I don't think that the over-reliance on technology is sustainable in the long run. I wouldn't even be surprised personnally if there were to be a global collapse of internet connectivity. It seems very fragile to me: the optical fibers in the ocean can be easily damaged, the datacenters can run out of power, political change in some countries may lead to connection to the outside to be severed or unusable. That is one of the reasons also why I don't personnally trust big platforms to store personal data that I wish to save.

I'll say this about my experience.

About 20 years ago, I saw that high school students had problems writing out every letter in cursive. Students may have been able to read them, but not write them from memory.

More recently, I work in a position where you have to read a lot of old scanned documents. There are documents that I could easily read, but staff in their early 20's found hard to read. They've eventually learned how, but the process to learn took longer than it did when I was their age.

I'll be surprised if it is an expected skill to read a document instead of Ctrl+F thirty years from now.

Digital devices are fragile as fuck. And I'm not talking about dropping your phone and cracking your screen. I'm not even talking about solar storms (which are a real threat to mass digitization).

I'm talking about the fucking supply chain and politics. You thought the GPU shortage was bad with the pandemic? Just wait untill the US or China (or a rogue state) bombs silicon factories in Taiwan to deny access to that strategic ressource to the other. Just wait till a natural disaster takes out the majority of the highly concentrated chip manufacturing capability (taste of it with hard drive prices in 2011 flood in Thailand). Just wait until we all find out that one or more countries we are now at war with has installed hardware backdoors in all our devices (narrator: they already have) and destroying our electronic devices is now a matter of national defense and survival. Just wait until the next piece of legislation in your jurisdiction limits your access to information online. Suddenly all the data you were consulting from overseas is no longer available.

This truly 'paperless' society techists salivate over is one borne of extreme geopolitical stability which is a blip on the human existance, and is completely untested in the real world.

I think it's going to depend a lot. I haven't used paper for anything for decades, and when I was graduating college back in 06 I remember one time I actually forgot how to sign a debit card slip as I just hadn't written anything by hand for years.

I'm kind of getting back to that - I don't have to sign slips ordering online or using a card at more and more stores.

For my job, there's no reason to write something out on paper, but I work in IT so I assume YMMV. Written on paper is actually a significant detriment to me - I can lose it way easier, it often isn't with me whereas digital text I can sync to different devices seamlessly. It can't easily be backed up. I can't copy from it or paste to it.

My sister OTOH works in consulting / planning. She uses like 3+ Monitors so she can see what she's referencing to then work on a document - but it's still all digital AFAIK.

So there's groups of people who paper doesn't help at all. I think the main use of paper is sticky notes to tell UPS to pick up a package left out, and the shipping labels.

Then I can imagine people who are artists who just like paper (I know someone like that). People like me who might like some books as collectibles / high quality / art in themselves. (Look up Folio Society for examples) People who don't work all day at a digital device. Older people who find paper and pen easier and faster than getting a device (I'm swapped - it's a higher cognitive load to go find blank paper and a working pen).

I do think we'll see general paper use trend downwards like physical letters have since the 1990s. Because it'll cost more, you'll need to go out of your way to have it on hand etc.

Thinking about the possibility of brain-computer interfacing is insane. It'll be possible to shove a thought into your shopping list... convert your dream into a text file to edit and include in your book later.

I do think writing by hand is a good skill to teach at least until highschool... from then on, there should be more accessible ways of getting your notes down and organised - and also easy to search and re-organise.

It's strange that after I tested out a couple of REALLY dirt cheap chinese pens to replace my old, trusty, fountain pen which got lost - this ended up with me having three transparent plastic pens (WingSung) that cost $2 each - and now my son has stolen one for school, filled with some Pelikan 4001 Royal Blue (every bit as nice as a blue EnerGel) but with a couple of ink-eradicator pens, he says it's better and faster than using the alternatives (FriXion is way overpriced, and not nearly as nice as a proper GelPen - and the rest of the competition is just nasty).

I also use a double-edged safety razor to shave, and found out (when I figured it was something most folks just hadn't thought about) that a few of my friends went there a year or two back... so many things should never need to die out, but obviously some things should be skipped...

Longer form (essays, dissertations, anything more than a page) is certainly a bit of a waste of time. I wrote a list of 'to read' books and stuck it up in my wardrobe, but the list changed... so now it's digital and that paper got trashed.

Another 100 years should see more convenient and effective alternatives.

I think probably paper could disapear, but it will be replace by handwriting in digital devices. I have replaced my notebooks by the kit iPad+Goodnotes+Apple Pencil. The experience is very similar and it has some advantages. I still prefer physical books to read, but as new generations start to read school books on iPads, this will be the end of physical books. So I think paper as default support for books will be replaced, but handwriting will be present in digital devices.

Probably not? I rarely write but there are still times. I have a whiteboard in my living room that is sometimes useful for tracking games or whatever when people are over. When doing woodworking or construction making marks and writing down measurements is very convenient.

I could maybe see these be replaced by AR, but even 50 years seems too short for complete replacement.

I do think cursive will go away. It seems to already becoming very rare. At this point writing large amounts of text by hand is a niche feature and slight speed improvements seem marginally useful. At this point written will largely look like typed text which means that writing will still be easy, you just mirror what you see on the screen rather than learning a separate set of figures. (IDK how this applies to other languages.)

I write for a living (academic) and have also been keeping personal journals since I first learned to write. For my academic writing I'm all digital, but I always journal by hand. In my experience there are quite very different types of thought and composition involved between the two, and I value them both immeasurably. So now, I don't think paper is ever going away.

It is interesting to see all the responses here, I happen to agree with you. It seems like penmanship is almost the cursive of today.

Handwriting is definitely a more fundamental skill but still in 100 years a lot can change! Think about all the other obsolete practices from 1923. Screens and machines are already ubiquitous in our daily lives.

Okay but... I went to school in Egypt for some years and they had recently started to use iPads as learning tools.

ONLY iPads. The kids would learn to read and write on them.

I can only let you imagine how confused the kids were when they suddenly had to try and actually use a pen.

I think it'll most likely become less common but there will always be a need for paper and handwriting.

I believe the technological singularity is going to occur within the next 5 to 20 years, resulting in a world where individuals can effortlessly communicate with computers using their minds. In such a scenario, it is unlikely that traditional writing methods would be widely utilized, as the convenience and efficiency of mind-computer communication would render them obsolete.

handwriting will almost certainly disappear in your lifetime, but paper? unlikely.

paperwork/records keeping is required by law for many sectors of the economy (banking, tax/accounting, architecture/drafting, insurance, etc).

no, paper is here to stay

Probably not? I rarely write but there are still times. I have a whiteboard in my living room that is sometimes useful for tracking games or whatever when people are over. When doing woodworking or construction making marks and writing down measurements is very convenient.

I could maybe see these be replaced by AR, but even 50 years seems too short for complete replacement.

I do think cursive will go away. It seems to already becoming very rare. At this point writing large amounts of text by hand is a niche feature and slight speed improvements seem marginally useful. At this point written will largely look like typed text which means that writing will still be easy, you just mirror what you see on the screen rather than learning a separate set of figures. (IDK how this applies to other languages.)

The paper we use nowadays is acutally a highly advanced, modern technology. It's not the same kind of paper from, say, 500 years ago an expensive product only used by few professionals. Modern paper is a highly industrialized, mass produced, widely available, incredibly cheap and (increasingly) renewable product. It's a technology as modern as tablets and computers, and arguably more integral to our daily lives.

Will paper become obsolete in 50 or 100 years? Maybe, yes. but it may as well become even more integral to our daily lives. Who's to say we won't develop new technologies to make paper even cheaper and more ubiquitous that it already is?

I'd say they'll become niche. I don't think it will go away though.

I will always use fountain pens and paper until I die, and I think there are enough people out there who will do the same to keep a much reduced industry going.

Honestly i hope so. It is bad for our environment (kills trees to produce)

theoretically, yes. e-ink is an affordable option. "digital paper" like harry potter is being developed that will be more portable than phones. assuming renewable power isn't an issue, someone can go their whole life without paper

personally, i enjoy the formality of a handwritten letter!

How will we make paper airplanes if there’s no paper? Checkmate, atheists.