It's over 20 years since I first went online...

[HollowTalk]

I was just thinking how different life is now - then we still had five channels (just) and a dial up connection. We'd only just started using emails at work and mobile phones were huge and expensive to use. You got what was given as far as entertainment was concerned and you paid by cash or cheque for everything you bought.

What difference do you think another 20 or 30 years will make?

My ds2 is profoundly deaf. Modern technology has meant we can communicate so much better than if he had been born 30 years ago.

The first time I went online was at uni in 1996...only we were only allowed to use it for online journals....nothing else at all. I remember we had to design a climatology website with hyperlinks. Mine was pretty crap but I got a good mark for hyperlink insertion .

I reckon in 20year, we will be paying for everything without a card. Maybe they’ll scan our eye with a scanner or our wrist.
Thinking the govt. want to put an RF chip in every one and track us but I don’t think that’s a good thing.

I reckon many people will be veggie/vegan and thee will delicious plant sourced foods available. I’m hoping there will be many more people growing foods hydroponically.

Also hoping, time travel will have been made public and we can just nip off backwards or forwards in time and that we can therefore travel on holiday without the need to fly (I don’t do flying in planes).

Years ago l was a designer and used to travel to our Head Office in Hong Kong. That office dealt with manufactures in Kirea, Thailand, Singapore etc.

In 1989 l was amazed at seeing a design slowly uploading on the internet. It was just beyond anything I’d known. All correspondence was mainly done by fax in those days.

Didn’t realise l was watching digital history. It took about an hour to receive one design!

About 3 years ago, the chip in one of my cards stopped working and it made the card machines print a thing to sign. Totally confused everyone!

Almost no one remembered they were meant to check my signature against the card.

Sorry to buck the trend, but I think things are going pretty slowly actually. My first computer was back in 1980 - the Sinclair ZX80. following by the ZX81, Commodore 64 etc. I started work in 1983 and even back then, we all had a Commodore PET computer on our desks!
I was paying for things by credit card in the mid 1980's and doing telephone banking in the early 90s (with one of the those number pad thingies you sent tones down the landline phone!). We were using modems in the early 90s so had internet back then. I got my first mobile phone in the early 90s too. Late 80's we were carrying around portable computers for work going out to clients' offices, and also had
portable printers which we took with us too. I bought my first "touchscreen" computer in around 1993/4 (a compaq concerto) which used an electronic pen instead of a mouse).

Looking forward, I can't actually see any radical changes in the next 10/20 years. We're still using cash, some 30 years after cards and remote banking became commonplace. We're still relying on the old landline copper cables for our internet. All this talk of implanted chips and driverless cars is for more like 50 years time. There's so much more we can do with today's technology so we'll just continue to see gradual change, as we've seen for the last 20-30-40 years.

I'm not entirely sure when I first went online, as the company I worked for in 1994 had a global email system, but I started using it in earnest in about 1997/98 but that was just at work.

Started using it at home in 1999 and the first thing I used it for was to order deliveries from Sainsbury's. Had a modem that plugged into the phone line and dialled up when it was in the mood. Took me forever to place an order!!!!

Now, I would be bereft without it in so many ways.

In the future, I think there will be greater control on content, although I'm not sure exactly how that will happen and I think the dark web will only get bigger.

I hope that connectivity will continue to improve for remote areas.

I'm sure that there are loads of exciting developments, that I can't even begin to imagine.

Sorry to buck the trend, but I think things are going pretty slowly actually.

I think they're going backwards. I find myself phoning more companies than before, not less. And most apps are shite. Give me a decent website anyday.

I hope that connectivity will continue to improve for remote areas.

Not even "remote" areas. I live in a village, just 5 miles from a city, with over 5,000 residents, and we're still on slow broadband. Yes, we have fibre to the village "exchange", but then it's all copper cabling throughout the village, so those living at the opposite end of the village still suffer slow broadband, even with fibre.

We also have pretty crap mobile phone coverage too, so you can't even get fast broadband via iphones which also means that modern developments such as broadband on buses doesn't work outside the city centre either.

It's going to be a long time before the internet takes over our lives in relatively built up villages still don't get decent broadband and mobile signals. Heaven help the really remote areas!!

The line between “online” and “offline” will become so blurred as to be meaningless. Technology will be inside us in some way; we will interface directly with computers. It will start as medical and military uses, and gradually we’ll have brain-computer interface.

AI will be hugely important. We have started to accept things like Alexa into our lives; in 20 years Alexa will appear laughable. AI will be EVERYWHERE, integrated seamless into our lives.

Cars will be electric and autonomous.

We will travel less. Our environment will have suffered hugely from inactivity. Weather will be more extreme. This will have geopolitical consequences.

There will be a manned research outpost on Mars. There will be the very beginnings of asteroid mining by unmanned craft. It will take a long time to catch on.

I fear we'll be moving towards living underground as we are well on course to trashing the earth. Literally a handful of years left to reverse course on climate change which would still leave us with significant warming over this century and the following ones, and extreme weather events. And by the way things are going, I fear our chances of effective planetary action are nil.

Also given humanity's track record in hubris, whatever geoengineering tricks we may possibly come up with to keep the planet liveable, if not thriving, will be guaranteed to have unforeseen effects that are unlikely to all be in our favour.

AI will be hugely important.

When it arrives yes.

My sister and I, who were about 13 and 11 at the time, would spend ages trying to get online with our rubbish dial up and then hang out in chat rooms pretending we were cool sexy students and chatting up men! Awful.

And my school friend had a "boyfriend" whom she'd met in a chat room. he was in the army in Canada (allegedly). They used to email each other and she'd bring in his emails printed out for us all to read. We were very jealous.

@NameChanger22
"In the future I think I think there will be a backlash against the internet and people will go back to the old ways again."

I think so too, although I would say technology in general as well as just the internet. There will be a resurgence of people becoming facinated by old skills and learning them again. Knitting is already gaining popularity as well as sewing and crafts and I think a lot of people will embrace the basics again. Minimalism will get super popular and people will steer away from the current constant cycle of buying stuff and having more and more.

The old skills and knowledge will be lost to future generations.

Technology is great, till it goes wrong.

Cashless society in the future?

Hmmm, what happened when TSB had problems?

Basic map reading skills? No problem while the smart phone is working.

What happens when it breaks or battery goes flat?

The old skills and knowledge will be lost to future generations.

You mean the way we no longer have to grind our own wheat? "But what if the flour factories break down?"

There's massive redundancy built into our system and even with massive failures at every level we'll probably sort it out right pronto, there's millions upon millions of very smart people in the world and if there was some serious systemic failure many of them would be directing their attention to fixing it.

Battery goes flat on my phone? I can ask someone else for directions. The entire cellular network goes down - there's going to be a lot of clever people working hard to make sure it's back up pretty soon (and I can still ask a local or something for directions).

The old skills and knowledge will be lost to future generations.

So ?

Most of the posters here have managed without a whole slew of old skills and knowledge.

There's this chocolate-box picture we seem to have of "the old days" where everyone knew everything. My . Even 200 years ago, most people hadn't a clue how to smelt iron (for example) , let alone build a forge and shoe a horse. I imagine there were commentators of the day bemoaning the passing of flint-knapping.

And there are skills and knowledge we lost long before the present technological age.

There's massive redundancy built into our system and even with massive failures at every level we'll probably sort it out

I've often wondered how many times the same invention must have happened before it was able to spread and take hold ? I doubt the wheel was actually invented and spread in the same epoch ... it was probably invented many times over time before it spread to become universal.

Possibly the same for farming and the like ....

I feel old. My very first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The software was on cassette tape and it was slow and ponderous but mind blowing at the same time. I think I first used the internet at work in the early 90s. We used to have to go to the IT dept and log on there to send emails. I did have a pc to work on, but it wasn't connected, so off I trotted to another dept to email, and yet another to print (with my files on a floppy disk, ready to be put into the computer that was cable linked to the printer). Those days were fun - we spent a lot of time away from our desks!

The old skills and knowledge will be lost to future generations

Blimey, there are still flint tool makers, basket weavers, spinners of wool, calligraphers etc. Last time I looked, all of those old skills and knowledge had been replaced by more modern methods but people can still learn them - they just become artisan crafts!

We had a second phone line installed in the first flat we owned just for the internet. Everything had to be plugged in to access it at that point. '94
Used to have shedloads of books, VHS tapes and CDs everywhere. All gone now. (Kindle / smart TV / spotify) Also boxes of photos. Again all on the cloud.
Holidays booked in an estate agent. Now we can do it from the sofa.
We used to have a file full of menus for takeaways. Now we get the same information online.
Yellow pages in case anything broke down and we had to find a tradesman.
So different now .....

My first computer was an Amstrad with green writing on a black background and dot matrix printer. I remember sending my first email in around 1995 and my mum complaining frequently about not being able to phone me because I was always using the dial up & had no mobile phone in those days.

Sadly I feel really pessimistic and worried about the next few decades. I think we're running out of time to avoid major disaster. Not just global warming but things like air quality, antibiotic resistance, mass extinctions, being able to grow enough crops to feed ourselves - even Michael Gove says we only have 30-40 years of soil fertility left in the UK.

I think the world is likely to become ever more unequal and unstable as countries compete for dwindling resources. Even if, against the odds, wealth does become more fairly shared, it will mean us (being a richer country) reducing our standard of living, because the world can't support it's entire population living at the standard of current western societies. So maybe resources we take for granted will become much more limited or rationed in some way - electricity, broadband, fuel, food, gadgets, clothing, etc.

I hope I'm wrong, but I worry a lot about what kind of world my children are going to living in when they are my age.

Can anyone remember LOVELY? Danny Wallace had a BBC show where he created a new country in his flat .... LOVELY. This 'country' had its own currency, rules (be nice) flag and forum. In the early days the forum really was a lovely gentle place to be but then it went the way of all forums and the BBC axed it.
Made some long lasting friendships from there including people in Australia, New Zealand and Derby!!
The odd thing was I was the last person who's ever think of going on line, chatting and shock horror joining a forum. No one else in our work or social circles did and i was thought of as odd. But, in retrospect it was one a great thing to be part of.

Still arguing about Brexit is my best guess.