Mod Notice: OP banned for being a bot.
Question gets to stay out of respect to those who wrote answers.
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2025
17 points (66.0% liked)
Ask Lemmy
35517 readers
1063 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
wow, how did you find out?
Vapes - A shitty, ewaste laden, version of smoking. Where unknown chemicals are vaporized and inhaled. This took off under claims it was a healthier alternative to smoking. This is going to look like radioactive toothpaste in hindsight.
Cable boxes - 30 years after high speed Internet, 25 years after ffmpeg, and 20 years after streaming... millions of people still pay $150 a month for a shittier, curated version of television that mostly required specialized hardware and drilling holes in your house.
high speed, stable, reliable internet also needs those holes, so that's not really a problem. sure, today it's better to build the house so that there are tubes in the walls for the cables
Astroturfing AI slop powered engagement bots rehashing reddit's greatest hits discussion topics like OP.
like landlines or vhs players seemed to us.
Us? Us??
I'm pushing 40 and I've never owned my own VCR. When I was at university a landline was thrown in with our internet connection but we didn't have a use for it. Landlines have been irrelevant my entire adult life.
That’s crazy to me. My parents still have a landline, and I used my VCR maybe two months ago to watch my copy of The Land Before Time. I’m almost 30. I know I could stream it online, but it just doesn’t hit the same
I'm in my 30s and we had a landline that we used primarily until like 2006
Nespresso pods.
This one of the products that have no rights to exist in this world. It should've stayed a fad where it died off silently because of how inadequate it is for long term production. It's a product which solves no real world problem, and sold simply because the impulsiveness of capitalism told them to without questioning it.
And so the only reason this is so common is because they had deep pockets for the marketing budget.
like landlines or vhs players seemed to us
Ouch, hurtful. You know lemmy skews older, right?
Anyway, here's my answer: Toilet Paper
This feels right but I'm very curious what's going to replace it. And no, it's not bidets. I have one that I use and it helps, but I still need TP to finish up, and not just to dry yourself off.
You don't know how to use the three seashells?
Hey everyone, that guy doesn’t know how to use the three seashells lol
teleport the poo right outta your colon
He died in a freak transporter accident.
Plastic and social media.
Maybe not entirely but the pretty much everyone uses it everyday part. Cars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQz4VBablAM
Waymo's starting to roll out self-driving robotaxis onto the freeway in the San Francisco Bay Area; news coverage from today.
My expectation is that there will be a lot more autonomous cars out there in the future.
Not the advancement in looking for
Analog clocks. Digital is so much easier.
Fillings and crowns. The dentist will regrow teeth.
Flashlights. You mean you carry a lighting device that does nothing else, when your phone can do that plus a million other things?
Keys. We'll likely carry a fob for most things. They'll be programmable to allow us to adapt to our locks, like a universal TV remote.
Fax machines in government. Someone in government will finally realize scan to email is so much cleaner.
Digital clocks might be easier for you, but not everyone. I chunk my time and looking at an analog clock helps me to visualize everything I’m going to be doing. I can’t do that with a digital clock. I will be the dinosaur clutching my analog clock when I’m old lol.
You still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea? How amazingly primitive.
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 produce orders of magnitude more light than any smartphone.
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.
Dentists will regrow teeth for the wealthy. The rest of us are just losing our teeth.
Net connected everything. The cracks are already showing but it's going to get worse, and then it'll swing back.
Floppy disks. Oh, wait...
Floppy disks will forever be used the way they are currently used: as the save icon.
I 100% read landmines and got really confused
I think you need to think about the rate at which technology has advanced in the last hundred years in general, then look at how it changed in the 10 year increments in that period then extrapolate out what has plateaued vs ramped up.
Broadly speaking, there have been major changes but the telephone existed in 1925, so did refrigeration, powered flight, and cars.
Medical tech is really where I think the biggest difference has been, and where I think we will continue to see major changes. If you compare our medical knowledge of diseases, cancer, and genetics today vs 1925 it seems huge (to an outsider). The difference between a computer in 1950 and today is largely scale and computer power, yeah, its improved but it still fundamentally does math in the same basic manner. Quantum computers may change that some but its still essentially math.
Phones, probably. At some point we're not going to be carrying these things around. Whether replaced by an implant or some kind of wearable, I have no idea.
Key in the ignition
Gasoline powered vehicles. Not only are they horrible for the environment and require toxic substances that impact people’s health, but they’re so expensive and high wear. All those moving parts, barely controlled explosions: WTF we’re those people thinking?
As electric vehicles enter the mainstream, they’re just simpler, more straightforward, and you can plug in overnight like you do with your phone. The complexity, moving parts, excessive maintenance will be like steampunk is for us (I already joke about that) and people won’t comprehend having to goto a local gas station and handle toxic fuels to fuel up. What is an oil change and who would do that? They won’t be able to comprehend the lead contamination, breathing in benzene, groundwater pollution, etc
Holding a thing to your face to talk to another human will seem like cave-men aping for a mate in the future. If I forget my bluetooth headset in the morning my day is shot - I'm sure the future is much brighter.
These things are always impossible to predict. But I'll try anyway.
What things like VHS and diskettes have in common is that they're clunky. They're a hassle to use, and they've been replaced by something easier. So what is currently a hassle to use, but we use every day?
Nothing obvious springs to mind, but I'm thinking of dishwashers and washing machines. Their main purpose is to save human time and effort, and they do a fantastic job at that compared to before, but there's still a lot of room to improve.
Dishwashers need to be carefully loaded and unloaded. (Also they often don't clean the dishes well unless you wash them a bit beforehand, defeating much of their purpose. Don't tell Alec from Technology Connections I've said this, but I tried putting dirty dishes in there and it just doesn't clean well enough. Maybe my detergent powder isn't good enough.)
Maybe in the future there would be a dishwasher-cupboard hybrid, where you just put the dirty dishes into it (WITHOUT having to think about how to place them) and it automagically cleans them and places them in the cupboard ready to take.
Washing machines also require a lot of hassle. Same idea but with a closet.
Everything connected to your phone. In less than 50 years they're gonna laugh about how we had apps for our washing machines and dishwashers.
I think you're partially right, but only about everything having a separate app.
The reality is connected devices will be so ubiquitous and commonplace that the interface will become standarfized and totally tansparent. Connecting to any arbitrary device will be as simple as connecting to an arbitray web server through a browser.
Every device needing its own app is temporary and unsustainable.
Please, you have to stop