What's next for the extinct tech list?

STEPHANIE GARDINER

With the digital world making the Kodak moment a distant memory, what else is on the brink of technological extinction?

Our telephone calls, photos, favourite TV shows, books and music can now all fit into our back pockets, so it's no surprise the endangered list is long.

We asked futurist and writer Mark Pesce what he thinks will soon disappear from our lives in the coming years.

LANDLINE TELEPHONES

"The landline is going away. The mobile is good enough for most people, most of the time. A lot of people have a landline in their house if they have Foxtel or they have DSL, but then you're not using it for phone calls you're only using it for those things."

And with the the death of the landline, the trill of the dial tone will also fade, Pesce said.

"If you're using a mobile you almost never hear a dial tone anymore. You don't even think about it. You just hit a button and a call gets made and you hear a ring on the other side, but you never hear a dial tone anymore.

"So all of that ritual associated with a phone call is also going away."

CHEAP POINT-AND-SHOOT CAMERAS

All mobile phones will eventually have high definition cameras in a few years' time, he said.

"The camera is migrating to the higher end, because the lower end is now being done perfectly well by the mobile.

"The cheap digital camera has only been around for a couple of years anyway, so that's just been a little blip."

RADIOS

"Most people will tend to listen to radio in the car now, and you'll see that slide over as people more and more plug their mobile into their stereo system in their car.

"People will still have radios for emergency broadcasting.

"But that all goes to streaming and to podcasting.

"Podcasting is the other face of radio now. Podcasting was to radio what VCR was to television."

Alarm clocks are also being replaced by mobile phones for many people, he said.

SCANNERS AND PROJECTORS

The death of the scanner may be a little slow, as many people still use them for legal purposes like signing contracts, Pesce said.

"Scanners are useful to the degree that we still have paper floating around in the world.

"I don't think it's going to make a hasty exit."

He said projectors will get smaller and lighter and built into mobile phones.

"Screens are becoming so cheap that the advantage of having a projector is not there much anymore, unless you're using it specifically for a lighting effect."

DVD PLAYERS

Pesce said DVD players will disappear and be replaced by online streaming and, for a short time, Blu-ray players.

"Is it going to be a replacement of one for the other or is it simply all going online? It's a bit of both.

"I think that Blu-ray is probably going to be the last transition we'll see in a physical medium, because after that it's all going to be NBN."

And on the evolution list...

TELEVISION SETS

Televisions will continue to be used as a display screen for video games or web browsing, but more and more people will turn to the internet to watch their favourite shows, Pesce said.

"If you have a video game system, you're using it as a computer monitor.

"If you have a DVD player or Blu-ray player, or a Foxtel IQ, you're not using it as a television you're using it as a display screen.

"We use the television because of the big screen. We have a lot of screens in the house but the television can be identified because that's generally the one that's the biggest."

BOOKS

"More and More people are getting e-readers. They're reading a lot but they're not buying physical books anymore, which is sort of a bummer because you can't walk into a house and see what someone is reading."

Book, DVD, CD collections will disappear as a result, Pesce said.

"Maybe someone will invent something that will allow you to display the books you are reading electronically in something that is kind of like whatever a bookshelf is going to be.

"People will still want to show that off.

"The CD collection, the DVD collection, the book collection, those are all going."

WATCHES

Despite many using their mobile phone as a substitute, wrist watches are making a comeback, Pesce said.

"There's this thing called generation C, the connected generation, you can tell if someone is in generation C by whether they wearing a watch or whether they get the time off their mobile.

"Now, in some sense the watch is reacting to that and it's moving from being utilitarian to actually becoming quite a fashion accessory."

- © Fairfax NZ News