Which current things do you think will disappear entirely in the next 5-10 years?

[Politicians247UnderwearExtinguishingService]

Looking at the world as we see it today and the way the wind is blowing, which things that are currently (and have often long been) a part of many of our lives can you see just completely vanishing completely - whether through the writing being on the wall for them and nobody wanting them anymore, or through actually being officially scrapped/banned?

So far, I've come up with (and there's every chance that I'll turn out to be hopelessly and laughably wrong):

TV licence in its current format. I don't think the BBC will disappear at all, but their privileged funding model, payable for watching ALL live TV, will only be sustainable for maybe 5 more years at most.

Broadcast/terrestrial/scheduled TV.

Cash and all bank branches. Also bank cards - all will be incorporated in phones as standard or swapped for implants.

Royal Mail. I think Amazon will branch into collections as well as just deliveries, with a much cheaper, quicker and more reliable service - probably more for parcels, as written letters become increasingly obsolete.
Also post offices will completely disappear.

Humans being allowed to drive vehicles - also leading to no need for anybody to actually own a car of their own, if they can use an app to summon a driverless pod at any time.

Printed newspapers and magazines, as well as paper utility bills, invoices, receipts etc. No urging to switch to receiving things online, as that will simply be the only option - even for important official documents. Before long, maybe all paper will be gone and seen as much as a relic of the past as parchment is now.

Private bonfires and fireworks.

Learning foreign languages - everybody will speak into their phones and the other person will automatically and seamlessly hear it in their own language - quite probably in the exact same voice.

In-person voting.

The option/ability to live life without being online.

There must be loads more... what else?!

Winter weather.
Cinemas
Liberaries
Computer games in physical form
Individual butcher shops

Controversial one, but I think people will finally realise that wide leg trousers look awful on absolutely everyone.

I completely agree that a lot of it is a retrograde step - I'm not saying that I necessarily want these things to disappear; just that I think they will - whether for good or for bad.

The Tories...

Teachers and nurses.
It's every governments' wet dream to get them off the books.

All those who think physical documents will disappear, are you sure you really want that? If everything EVERYTHING is stored on line, what will happen when there is an extended or permanent loss of the Internet (whether by accident or sabotage)? I am fairly sure this will happen at some stage. I always keep a good amount of cash at home and make sure I print any important documents.

You realise that ‘the internet’ doesn’t work like that. It’s not just one big thing that can be shut down or erased en masse?

Normal TV will probably disappear at some point. Young people don’t watch tv the way we used to, only watching streaming services. I stopped buying a tv licence a number of year’s ago when the kids still lived at home and mainstream tv wasn’t missed by any of us.

Do you believe/know that magazines as a concept are on the way out; or just the printed medium of them?

I suppose, with digital magazines available on Readly and elsewhere, it must take away the 'exclusivity' of your own special brand - when there are hundreds of others available to switch to at any time. Plus the cost to the consumer - like with streaming music vs buying physical CDs - must hit revenues enormously.

I don't think actual physical books will go anywhere anytime soon. Something that you decidedly choose to read and commit to, as opposed to a much more ephemeral magazine that many people idly flick through without anything like the same level of dedication. I sincerely hope not!

That said, I don't think new physical books will be published in printed form forever. We'll still have the existing ones - as long as they last and don't fall foul of changing sensibilities and attitudes - but I think the norm will be ebooks before a very long time.

They could at least make the pricing more realistic, though. It's madness that 200+ pages of ink-filled paper that gets bound, packed, stored in a warehouse and then delivered to your door often costs less than/the same as pressing a button to automatically download it to your device in a few seconds. I'm absolutely not saying that authors shouldn't be paid properly for their hard work, but who currently gets all the extra money that isn't spent on paper, ink, storage or logistics?

Isn’t the intention of war to cause a lot of loss of life? And l think wars will get worse not better. Theres too many now, no sign of them cooling down.

That would be nice. Especially if smoking doesn’t come back to replace it.

Cigarettes - they're nearly gone in the UK, to the point its rare to smell it out in public, but I think it will be totally gone

Hairdressers that mainly service old ladies wanting a 'shampoo and set' - nearly extinct now

Being able to make a career in the arts unless your parents are rich. Mind you, think that went some time ago

Print media

How on earth do you think digital content is managed and distributed? By the magic fairies?

There are significant costs managing and distributing digital content just as there are with hard copies - the specific costs may be different but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Oh and of course the tax you pay on digital books/magazines is different from the tax applied to the hard copy versions.

I know plenty of intelligent articulate young people. Most of them are much better at life than I was at their age.

Cold winters in England

I work in academic libraries and I've been going to conferences since the 90s on tge topic of the death of the book. Whilst it's true that online platforms and other media have transformed my workplace, there is still a lot of print around and people like reading physical books for leisure. There are lots of media pundits and industry professionals who'd so much prefer to put up the image that everyone uses kindles etc.

You paint a dystopian world. Certainly, the loss of paper copies will be dangerous. E.g. a digital text can be changed whereas a paper copy cannot without it showing up immediately. Thus books, textbooks etc can be changed without people noticing, rewriting history, re-writing evidence etc.
With payment by phone or by chip both bank and government can track all spending, opening the doors to regulation on what you can spend your money on (China already has some version of this) and potentially the government knowing all about you all in one place (currently the UK constitution does not allow this).
People may think giving up the things you list mean a better world. It means a very much more controlled world - e.g. you've called a car seven times this month and gone to three political venues...
And not all of us have given up writing letters, posting things in post boxes...paperless is assumed, and digital copies can be changed...as I said.
The BBC's licence fee (c.40p a day) guarantees at least one source of information that is not controlled by commercial interests...despite it's manifold biases the BBC is not in the pocket of big pharma or the military-industrial matrix.

So what I think we will lose is freedom of action and speech, free access to uncensored and immutable publications and free access to ideas which have not been 'doctored' to reflect current ideas, free access to transport to go wherever we wish when we wish, democracy, freedom.

New cars with internal combustion engines.

I work in publishing. The costs of printing and distributing print are absolutely miniscule in the grand scheme of things. The vast majority of the cost is for the content and the people working on that (editing, marketing, designing etc) and the business of publishing in general. That's why digital copies cost much the same.

Paper books are actually becoming more popular again, after a definite lull when e-readers became popular. People prefer print, especially when it's a big release with a nice cover that people have been looking forward to.

And I read books on my phone, I imagine a lot of other people do too, but I just look like I’m staring at my phone!

Haven’t read the full thread but keys - surely it will go digital!

My 20 year old is very switched on, far more than I was at that age. Very smart, very articulate.

I can’t do that, I’d get a migraine. I had a kindle once and couldn’t get on with it because of the negative effects it had on me.

@SinceWeAreOne I left primary teaching after 20 years last year and should have left far sooner! I think it would be great if robots replaced teachers so that my colleagues didn't have to do such an awful job. Let the robots crack on with it - at least they haven't got to worry about their MH.

Oh, I'm not suggesting that there isn't a huge amount of work done to prepare digital media for consumption - and of course all of these people should be properly paid for their work.

Just that, once it's all been done, it makes no real difference to the extra costs whether you sell 10,000 copies or 10 million.

Maybe some comparison could be drawn with theatre tickets - where the production involves a load of work from lots of people to bring it to fruition... but the days of having to have a physical, staffed box office and/or printing tickets, putting them in an envelope and having to take them to the postbox and pay for postage are long gone.

Then again, we still have the concept of 'booking fees' - even when it's all been set up to go automatically and you choose, buy and download your tickets yourself. Seems like something of a con to me, personally.

I suppose this might be a modern-day version of what probably happened when the printing press was invented. Yes, it still took resources and needed people to set it all up and maintain everything - but the costs for producing thousands of copies were hardly the same as in the days when you had to have a monk with a quill and parchment handwriting every single copy.