I think it’d look something like this:

50 years: Textbooks mostly gone from schools in many developed countries. Paper might be used occasionally when tech isn’t working, but teaching will be done mostly on computers or tablets. Most kids will have “ugly” handwriting because of they rarely write. The devices kids use to learn might be provided by the school, or some schools school might require kids to bring their own as part of a back to school supplies list.

In the adult world, paper will be mostly gone except like militaries or certain government agencies where secrecy is important. Certain jobs where there are safety procedures to be followed will still have paper instruction manuals.

For the average person’s home, there will be no paper except perhaps a small amount of people who still carry cash. Privacy-concious people will still write on paper. Everyone else just use their phone notes app.

In developing/undeveloped countries, they will be mostly the same but lagged behind developed countries like 30 years.

100 years: Paper is near extinct. Schools no longer have paper except one or two packs of printer paper in the main office probably for redundancy. Tech mostly don’t fail anymore, so any paper probably has been sitting on a shelf somewhere for many years. There would be very few amount of paper left in the world. For security sensitive purposes, air-gapped tablets will replace paper.

From this point on, humanity will move towards a future without paper.

But that’s just my prediction, what do you think?

  • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.)

    • japps13@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      The cursive thing is US-only. The speed highly depends on the type of notes you’re taking (with or without sketches, with or without equations, etc.).