[phoenixdblack]

I don't think smartphones will stay with us for very long. They'll probably be replaced by future technologies less clunky (and yes, I am calling smarthphones clunky) in favor of things like glasses, contacts and implants.

I think our children won't be "anti-smartphone" in the same vain as we are not "anti-mainframe"

[mortenjorck]

Mainframes didn’t go away; we just renamed them to “the cloud.”

Smartphones won’t go away. Yes, wearables will replace some use cases – just as personal computers replaced some mainframe use cases and smartphones replaced some personal computer use cases. But smartphones will continue to evolve, just as one can draw a line from time sharing on an IBM 709 to spinning up a Kubernetes cluster.

[Wowfunhappy]

Even without any particularly futuristic hardware, I'm of the belief that someone could design a smartwatch which does 80% of what I use a smartphone for. We primarily need better voice recognition (where better = basically flawless), and more power-efficient CPUs and radios.

A smartwatch can give directions, read and reply to messages, look up information, display schedules, and take pictures—all without taking my attention too far away from the real world. Anything longer I may as well do on a computer or tablet. I wouldn't be able to read the news or random forums, but the inability to do that 24/7 would be healthy IMO.

I don't forsee a future where smartwatches could replace smartphones for everyone, but I do think they could replace them for a lot of people, me included.

[mantap]

How would you get any privacy? I don't think other people on the train are going to be happy with me dictating "eggplant emoji smirk emoji" to a wearable.

[capableweb]

If your texts frequently contain a particular phrase, have aliases! Saying "purple sun" will actually dictate "eggplant emoji smirk emoji"

[saagarjha]

You can’t always dictate responses to your watch, and trying to respond with anything that doesn’t fit on the screen is really inconvenient.

[Wowfunhappy]

In my company's open office, I can whisper into my Pebble and it'll still pick it up†. On e.g. the subway there would be way too much background noise, but I can imagine a future where AI filters that out.

And, society can adapt. People used to talk on the phone in public constantly (and still do to a large extent, just less). This would be far less intrusive.

† For what it's worth, this is Google's AI. Rebble, the community-run service that lets Pebble's operate post-shutdown, chose Google for voice dictation, and as a result its more accurate now than it was originally.

[apocalypstyx]

I think it will be the opposite. I see an oblong, handheld, glass-ish-surfaced slab as our QWERTY keyboard (an interface ideology that has now plagued us for 147 years). Solutions to particular engineering problems in particular times and places tend to stick around far longer than technically necessary. (Most of the mechanical limitations that made QWERTY necessary were solved barely a decade after the Sholes and Glidden came about, yet even now the layout appears on our phone screens.)

[jschwartzi]

Qwerty is great for phone keyboards because it puts all the letters for one word nearby one thumb. And I can swipe words without leaving one or the other half of the keyboard. For all that it was about physical limitations of typewriters it's actually a good design for swipable keyboards too because it limits the size of the stroke, reducing the number of characters that could be part of the path.

[dangus]

I don’t buy your vision of the future because interacting with things with our hands is the most intuitive interface.

And the idea that we will jump to having our devices being able to read our mind seems like a stretch.

[phoenixdblack]

I don't think we'll jump straight to mind-controlled (that sounds weird) devices, but I'm pretty confident we'll be there by 2040.

As VR and AR progresses there are great new features like hand tracking, which allows for even higher precision than swiping on your phone. I agree with you, interacting with things through your hands is really intuitive, but I don't think we have unlocked it's full potential.

[ashtonkem]

I remain dubious about VR/AR, because the use cases have remained incredibly narrow. VR has remained a more or less video gaming only niche, and AR is something I interact with once a year or so, mostly to see if furniture would fit.

It’s possible that future technology will make it more useful, but on the current trend it doesn’t seem likely that AR/VR would surpass even my Apple Watch usage, let alone iPhone.

[jschwartzi]

Me too. People forget that the technology they're supposedly replacing is something we use in public. So any replacement technology needs to not erase the context of being in public around other humans, and it also needs to be discrete. VR and AR are not particularly discrete, and they also erase a lot of context so they're non-starters outside of very specific technological environments like CAD.

[adrianN]

With sufficiently smart technology, more subtle gestures can be used to interact with it.