Thursday - Science Fiction or Technology? 92

On the farm when I was growing up there was an old bachelor farmer Mr. M., up the road about a mile (hmm, looking back at it a 50 year old never married farmer, with a fresh young farm hand most summers - makes me kinda wonder) who didn't have electricity installed in his farmhouse until the early 1970's.  He heated his house with wood, cooked on a wood and coal stove.  He couldn't see electricity, didn't understand it, didn't want to pay for it, so he didn't use it until he had to.  Then he didn't use it much. He grew up in an era when electricity was the stuff of science fiction, light at the touch of a button, from a source you can't see, that flows magically through the walls in a solid wire.  Pure fantasy of H. G. Wells.  

Within my lifetime video calls, on demand, have gone from the science fiction of beam me up Scotty communicators, to early video calls that required special phone lines to transmit a grainy black and white image on a tiny screen, to 100 people online with 30 people at a time, on a massive screen, in full color with live audio, and virtual backgrounds. If you had asked me 25 years if we could do this, I would have responded, only in our dreams. Good video calls have been around for about 15 years.  Google video chat or hangouts, Skype, and others.  Many of these required accounts, most were limited to just two parties (until the last few years.) Recently I was at a conference where a speaker needed to appear on video and I was surprised that the AV team were struggling to make it work, after Covid I thought everyone would be video connected. But then Mr. M. was the last house in the neighborhood to give into the unknown of electricity.  

I watched fax machines take over the business world, at one time there was a shortage of phone numbers in big cities because of companies adding extra lines for fax, or data service on dial up. Fax was science fiction before World War II, boomed in the 1980's and is all but dead today. (I took the fax number off my business card years ago.) 

Landline phones, connected to a wire someplace in your house or office are rapidly going away. A technology that was science fiction before the 1870's, talking here and being heard miles away, how crazy. 

My prediction, phone service as we know it will largely go away, even voice only calls on the phone in your pocket.  Video calls will replace it. Instant messaging, and AI interaction is taking over.  There are those that say email is dying, what we need is a better instant or director private messaging services. There are too many fractured players in the marketplace, with technology that is incompatible with one another.  If phones hadn't established standards so that calls could pass from one carrier to another, phones would have been passing fad.  

We are in the early stages of wearables, smart watches, Google Glass.  Implantables are still on the edge of science fiction - but I live in an area that is a center for cochlear implants, science fiction / technology enabling hearing. So maybe in the future, we won't need a device, we will be the device.  Scoff if you may, Mr. M., did about light at the flick of a switch.