I’m afraid the answer will be air conditioning and indoor plumbing.
As someone who has grown up watching Card Catalogs lose to electronic search, Internet Directories lose to electronic search, photo albums lose to electronic search, Curated Network Televisions lose out to ellectronic search, large-scale advertising lose out to electronic search…
I don’t know. But whatever it is, 20 years from now, we’d say “Why didn’t you have a search engine that could do that for you?”
With (general) search engines being on decline for years that looks not all that probable. No popular search engine even searches what you asked it to search more of what you probably meant if you were as dumb as their ai thinks you are.
Card Catalogs were these index-cards we kept in a cabinet that helped people look for a book. And don’t say “word of mouth”, because card catalogs didn’t help with that. Card Catalogs helped you go from “Author or Subject” to “Book”, so you were literally trying to figure out a book you already “had an idea” about.
Tell me, how do you look for new books today? Do you use Amazon’s search engine? Google’s search engine?
Internet Directories were these lists of webpages that we used to organize. It was before webrings. The gist is that an internet directory is a list of cool websites on a certain subject, and we can keep those lists organized. Alas, no one used them after good search engines were made.
Curated TV Networks are losing out to Netflix, Youtube, and TikTok. All of which are search-engine based media consumption technologies. All hail the algorithm.
Now tell me where “search” is actually losing in our society. Maybe Google isn’t as dominant as it once was, but Netflix is still a damn search bar.
Maybe TikTok is finally something different: you don’t even search anymore. The algorithm assumes it knows what videos you like and shoves the next video into your face.
Right I think your last point will be the thing we look back on in wonderment. You mean you used to have to TELL the website what you wanted? How am I supposed to know??
Search engines are getting worse because they are moving towards selling you stuff instead of searching for stuff.
I think it’s a bit more insidious. Yes the root of the issue is greed, but writing a good search engine has become much harder since the first iteration of Google. Now you have to deal with SEO-optimized marketing material generated by AI.
Building a “good” search engine today is like entering an arms race.
Amazon has become really bad.
Amazon is like that Stoner Uncle that says shit like, “just trust me bro, you need the DKAIRBGAUENBSHDBDJS 17-IN-ONE BACK MASSAGER TAX CALCULATOR LEFT SIDE ONLY LETTER OPENER CAT FOOD DISPENSER!”
And instead of providing said Uncle with powerful psychotropic medications and 24-7 supervision we made him into a multi-trillionaire.
Car centric infrastructure 🤣 lol back in the 2020s they had to travel in slow ass crowds of cars 🤣🤣🤣 nobody liked driving but they settled for it because it was the best they had! Although I wish I could have bought Tears of the Kingdom when it was new, I don’t even want to know what cars were like.
TIL I can italicize emojis and I’m gonna try it out right now 😆
Edit: I love it ❤️
fun fact, italicised emojis work pretty much everywhere except on apple devices
Hopefully, single use plastics would be a ridiculous thing in the future, maybe they will look back at it like we look back at asbestos.
Here is a funny asbestos ad from the past
God, I wonder how many people got those and used them regularly who are now having issues because of them?
I’m pretty sure they put asbestos in basically anything back in the day.
Our ironing board had an asbestos pad at one end for sitting the iron on.
Probably not many. Asbestos is bad when it gets into the air. If it’s within an oven mitt, even if cut, how would it get into the air?
freedom to leave our houses
freedom
Fixed it for you.
thanks 😒
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.
Disposable vapes…
For most of us in the US: Having an endless supply of cheap, clean fresh water
I’m not a doctor.
But possibly there will be a better way to treat/cire cancer, and thus chemotherapy will be seen as similar to how we today see bloodletting or lobotomy.
Poison the cancer slightly faster than the whole organism! My dad cancer treatment gave him liver disease that eventually turned into a cancer that was way more deadly than his original cancer.
I like this one the most. Chemo can be absolutely brutal.
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.
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.
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 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-drive vehicles. And we might not even have to wait 50 years!
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
I just looked up your source. That is of new vehicles sold. While a good start, you’re skipping my latter part about people not replacing their vehicles for a decade. Only 3% of vehicles globally on the road are EVs per the source.
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?
The latter.
And, star trek.
We could probably have or be close to a post scarcity society today if people weren’t so fucking greedy.
Greed was a useful trait when it was down to survival of the fittest before we developed agriculture.
After that, the usefulness of greed became less relevant over time, and I would argue that at this point, it’s counter productive.
Just saying.
Food industry in current form
It’s hard to feed large populations. If not for the current form of the food industry, we wouldn’t be able to. It’s good for a first draft, now we have to refactor (and we are slowly doing that)
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 believe you. History is full of movements and counter-movements. I don’t know if it’s going to be such a big movement though. Social media is literally addictive. Most people are not strong, mindful or willing enough to kick the habit
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
If you happened to touch shit with literally any part of your body other than your asshole, would you be happy with just wiping it with a piece of dry paper, or would you immediately go wash it?
I have no more questions…
Btw, don’t even get me started if you have a hairy butt.
It’s like trying to wipe peanut butter out of a shag carpet.
Does your asshole touch a lot of surfaces?
Mine mostly just touch my underwear…
frankly once you go water you simply cannot go back
So you’re OK with your asshole having some shit remaining on it because it only touches your underwear?
I feel for your SO.
Ok, this is fascinating.
This thread was about wiping with paper after going to the toilet, this was not a thread about general cleanliness.
I shower every day, this obviously includes wasing my asshole.
So now, I want an answer to this question.
What in this entire thread gave you the impression that I never wash my asshole?
I stand by what I wrote, wiping after using the toilet is fine, it obviously is a temporary solution until the next proper shower, but that is fine.
Added water infrastructure? My guy, the connection for the cistern is right there. The added infrastructure is literally a tee piece and the hose.
That is fair, though in places with unreliable water I doubt that using water to flush or a bidet would be the first priority.
This is just my experience, but that experience includes travelling through some remote areas in less developed countries. Water to wash is usually the first upgrade on the tech tree- It’s unlocked right after you dig a hole in the ground. Grinding xp to get plumbing will make life nicer, but to start with you just need to gather enough resources for a bucket.
Chad
Long live the three seashells
Possibly US specific: Artificial Red/Yellow/Blue dyes in food. I hope…
What the hell, I misread the OP’s title and thought it was about stuff that was common 20 years ago which is no longer normal… I was very confused with everybody else’s answers lmao.
Sadly I can’t think of an answer for the thread, so downvote/upvote at your will 😂
It’s ok
