Every year, scores of technologies become obsolete and are replaced by something sleeker, smaller, faster, and more efficient. The past decade has seen the death (or at least decline) of landline phones, VHS, floppy disks, terrestrial TV, and dial-up internet––to name just a few. Today, as the ever-expanding effects of globalization create an increasingly broad demand for high-end goods, the process of technological evolution is only accelerating. Obviously, this means that the technological landscape in 2022 will scarcely resemble its current state. And while we don’t claim to be able to predict what the future holds, here are our top picks for the tech tools that are fast becoming yesterday’s news.
1. Live Television
The internet today is a place where you can find basically any type of media you could possibly want. If you are interested in learning to play the guitar, there are YouTube videos that will teach you; if you want movies, there are countless websites for streaming them; and if you want music, news, books, sports, or video games, it is all just a click away. So why are we still flipping through channels and watching someone else’s schedule when we can make our own?
If you buy a new television today, there’s a fair chance that it has capabilities for internet access. Soon TV will undergo an on-demand revolution that will put an end to the days when TV broadcasters choose for us what to play and when. It makes sense for viewers who prefer to decide for themselves, it makes sense for advertisers who will have access to more targeted audiences, and it makes sense for TV producers who will no longer be obliged to fill 24 consecutive hours of air time. So say goodbye and good riddance to the old way of doing television.
2. External Data Storage
With the advent of cloud computing and the ease of online backup, there is no longer any need to keep lugging around flash drives and bulky external disks. Unlike their non-physical modern counterparts, they require the increasingly antiquated practice of being plugged in using messy, inelegant wires that would just make them an eyesore in the bright future when there’ll be scarcely a cable in sight. Not to mention the fact that a single hard drive fault can cost you all of your data! Get rid of it!
3. 2D Movies
More and more movies are being shown in 3D these days, and this should come as no surprise, given the vast improvements to the 3D experience since the days when you needed goofy looking blue and red paper glasses to see lame hands reaching out screens to grab you. Nowadays you can get a 3D TV for your living room without actually having to spend too much, and there are screens in development that don’t even require you to wear glasses at all. Soon enough, two-dimensional cinema will be a thing of the past.
4. Non-Video Cell Phones
Our technologies all seem to be headed in the direction of consolidation. Look at smartphones today; they are quickly eliminating the need for mp3 players, digital cameras, GPS systems, diaries and more. Why carry around five things when you can have one that does it all? This trend is only going to continue, and with the introduction of Facetime on the new iphone, and the spreading popularity of Skype, it will soon be ‘quaint’ to own a phone that doesn’t allow you to see the person you are talking to. After all, they say that fifty percent of human communication is non-verbal.
5. Passwords
Most laptops and ATM machines already have cameras built into them, so it isn’t much of a reach to see how biometric methods such as voice recognition, retina and fingerprint scanning and facial recognition could quickly replace the need for remembering passwords. Sure, it is definitely a bit Big Brother-ish to imagine your genetic information being stored in a global database somewhere, but it will also be pretty damn cool when you can access your bank account or unlock on your laptop just by looking at it. The one drawback we envisage is an increased trade in stolen eyeballs.
6. Classical Computers
The first (though admittedly extremely basic) quantum computers have already seen the light of day, and countless teams of computer scientists and university researchers around the world are hard at work on harnessing the power of quantum energy for the potential it holds to revolutionize the computing world. Classical computers work by processing in discrete states of zeros and ones, but quantum computers are theoretically capable of making use of indeterminate and entangled states to exponentially speed up processing speed. The field of quantum computing is still in its infancy, but if quantum computers can become a reality, it will mean that a single machine will be able to do in a matter of seconds what now takes our most advanced systems decades to complete.
The technologies we use have a tremendous impact on the way we live and the way we think. Among other reasons, this is because the media we use to transmit and consume information inevitably alters the content of that information itself. So while it is always interesting to imagine the amazing technologies that the future has in store for us, it is even more fascinating to think about how those technologies will alter our imaginations and the ways in which we see ourselves and the world around us in years to come.
When not speculating about the future of technology, the team at Broadband Choices love to compare broadband to get you the best deal on data plans.
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