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Why do you believe this? I can't imagine paper being used for things like documents or communication 100 years from now at all. I could imagine it still being

by lgas 9y ago

Why do you believe this? I can't imagine paper being used for things like documents or communication 100 years from now at all. I could imagine it still being used for arts but if there aren't other widespread uses for it then it will probably be rare enough to be pretty expensive for artistic usage. I'm also not convinced all that many people will even want to use it for artistic purposes when, by then, you'll have things Google's Tilt Brush but with 100 years of advances on top of it.

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
Because not everybody will be plugged into a 100% electronic society and will need paper for documentation and exchange of goods. At the very least we're still going to need toilet paper and cardboard boxes.
- anonymfus 9y ago
  Toilet paper usage can be significantly reduced by adoption of bidet and washlets.
  - pishpash 9y ago
    Yeah but why bother.
    - ben_w 9y ago
      Because that can get you much cleaner with much less effort and one less thing for your shopping list.
jacobolus 9y ago
Paper is an incredibly versatile tool: 1. You can cut, tear, fold, roll, crumple, burn, sew, staple, glue, laminate, etc. it, including sticking found objects to it, wrapping things with it, making it into 3-dimensional structures, ... 2. It comes in a wide variety of colors, textures, thicknesses, and sizes – if you want you can cover your whole wall with one piece of paper. Some paper is translucent and can be used for tracing. 3. You can draw/write/paint over it with a wide variety of substances with a wide variety of appearances. You can fit visible information more densely on paper than pretty much any other available medium. 4. There are many nice tools for interacting with paper, such as rulers, compasses, french curves, pantographs, planimeters, ... You never run into a case where two drawing tools can’t be used together because they run different operating systems. 5. You can easily make physical copies of electronic documents and images onto paper, easily manipulate paper documents, easily copy paper documents from one piece of paper to another, and easily put paper documents back into digital form. 6. It’s incredibly cheap. 7. The right kinds of paper stored properly last a really really long time (centuries if not millennia). 8. It is light and portable, can be stuck up pretty much anywhere. 9. It requires no batteries, no legacy systems, no software updates, no expensive equipment, no special training, .... 10. It is its own concrete physical record, which can be effectively checked for tampering and made difficult to forge at scale. (Hence use for money, ballots, contracts, titles, ...)
- mysterypie 9y ago
  > rulers, compasses, french curves, pantographs, planimeters I had never heard of a planimeter[1], but what a fascinating device it is! I'm surprised that such a thing is possible: that you can calculate the area of an arbitrarily complex shape just by tracing the perimeter with a simple mechanical device. Unfortunately, how it works is not at all intuitive but seems to require a fair amount of math to understand. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planimeter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planimeter
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    If you have ever studied vector calculus, the idea is a straightforward application of Green's theorem. The discrete version is the 'shoelace formula'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoelace_formula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoelace_formula This kind of thing is one of the more important ideas from 19th century math/physics, and is studied by most STEM undergraduates in their first or second year.
  - progval 9y ago
    I know a researcher (Olivier Bournez) who uses the planimeter as an introduction to analog computing. His claim is that planimeters are single-purpose analog computers, much like calculators are single-purpose digital computers. He then logically generalizes planimeters into General purpose analog computers, which I find quite fascinating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_analog_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_analog_compute...
  - jaclaz 9y ago
    >I had never heard of a planimeter[1], but what a fascinating device it is! Not only, it was (is) extremely accurate if used properly. I am old enough (unfortunately) to have used planimeters professionally in the '80's (just before drawing started becoming digital), at the time they were largely used because they were much faster than calculating exactly (and already hand calculators with trigonometric functions existed) some data in roads cross-sections. So, for temporary accounting, planimeter based measures of areas were accepted (usually reduced by 5% or 10%). Basically you had a (hand drawn) inked drawing of each cross section of the road (usually one every 20 m or so) where you would draw a pencil line at the level that was reached in the works, and then use the planimeter to get the area (and consequently volume) of the earthworks done at the date. When the level was final, the amount would be calculated analitically, still manually, usually, but I managed somehow to write for the HP97[1][2] (constrained by 256 steps!) a small program capable of automatically calculating that, of course typing the measures manually. Large stretches of the road earthworks had already been calculated by the planimeter and when re-calculated, the differences were very small, within 1% or 2%. [1] http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp6797.htm http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp6797.htm [2] http://www.hpmuseum.org/97.jpg http://www.hpmuseum.org/97.jpg
mattmanser 9y ago
Depends what you mean by paper. Toilet paper, cardboard boxes, sales packaging, food packaging, etc. Are they paper? Just looking up paper usage worldwide, there's been no decline over the last 10 years[1], it's been flat. before that, though I'm having trouble pinning down. There's also this[2] which claims there is no significant decline in the type of paper you're talking about. I find that hard to believe though given what I remember about offices in the 2000s. [1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/270317/production-volume-of-paper-by-type/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/270317/production-volume... [2]http://www.thepaperlessproject.com/facts-about-paper-the-impact-of-consumption/ http://www.thepaperlessproject.com/facts-about-paper-the-imp...
krapp 9y ago
Paper was useful a thousand years ago, people find paper useful today, and it's likely people will find it useful a thousand years hence. The digital device you're using, the operating system it's running, and any apps running on it will likely be considered obsolete garbage within a year.
- zwischenzug 9y ago
  Within a year? Seriously?
  - krapp 9y ago
    Fair enough, maybe that was a bit hyperbolic. An electronic device still wouldn't be useful as long as paper, at least not for the average person. There's no planned obsolescence or EOL with paper.
    - zwischenzug 9y ago
      Most of the books I own will crumble to dust in 100 years, I understand. That said, so will most data formats.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      So what? I have an MP3 file on my laptop that I first downloaded in 1999. Who cares if the physical support that encodes it is long gone? It's not like we're going to give up on using computers even if we do keep using paper, so there's no savings there, only extra waste.
ggg9990 9y ago
Because virtually all previous forms of media are still in (limited) use, so paper is unlikely to be an exception.
lr4444lr 9y ago
Private contracts with huge risk fallout should there be either unauthorized viewing, copying, or modification, are highly useful to keep on paper. All parties get one or more copies, and they can be put into physical safe deposit boxes. This helps prevent or at least better assign liability to catastrophic events like deed fraud. If county governments with poor IT security should have an undetected breach, it could be a real mess without a paper trail.
proginthebox 9y ago
The low technical nature of paper is a huge factor.
- cube00 9y ago
  The new version will just be nano bots holding hands.
flogic 9y ago
I once did a thought experiment on what it would take to replace the paper scoring sheets for horse competition. It was fairly daunting. It needs to be simple enough for a lay person to use well. Recording, corrections, and commenting all needed to seamless. Since there are multiple riders on course, the user needs to be able to react quickly and potentially out of order. Paper is really hard to beat in that case. Corrections are just using the pencil eraser or crossing out. Field selection is just where you have the pen at that moment. Communication sucks in that the sheets are picked up by a runner. But even on that count going digital adds it's own complications. I assume that someone will do it eventually but for such a seemingly simple case the constraints are deceptively tight.
- fny 9y ago
  Why is digital paper not an option here? If we're talking about a timeline of 100 years, I'm almost certain we'll have something thin, reusable, with low power that you can write on with a stylus. After all, we're almost there today: we're just missing the thin part.[0][1][2] [0]: http://myboogieboard.com/ http://myboogieboard.com/ [1]: http://remarkable.com http://remarkable.com [2]: http://noteslate.com/ http://noteslate.com/

by lgas 9y ago

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago

Because not everybody will be plugged into a 100% electronic society and will need paper for documentation and exchange of goods. At the very least we're still going to need toilet paper and cardboard boxes.

anonymfus 9y ago
Toilet paper usage can be significantly reduced by adoption of bidet and washlets.
- pishpash 9y ago
  Yeah but why bother.
  - ben_w 9y ago
    Because that can get you much cleaner with much less effort and one less thing for your shopping list.

jacobolus 9y ago

Paper is an incredibly versatile tool: 1. You can cut, tear, fold, roll, crumple, burn, sew, staple, glue, laminate, etc. it, including sticking found objects to it, wrapping things with it, making it into 3-dimensional structures, ... 2. It comes in a wide variety of colors, textures, thicknesses, and sizes – if you want you can cover your whole wall with one piece of paper. Some paper is translucent and can be used for tracing. 3. You can draw/write/paint over it with a wide variety of substances with a wide variety of appearances. You can fit visible information more densely on paper than pretty much any other available medium. 4. There are many nice tools for interacting with paper, such as rulers, compasses, french curves, pantographs, planimeters, ... You never run into a case where two drawing tools can’t be used together because they run different operating systems. 5. You can easily make physical copies of electronic documents and images onto paper, easily manipulate paper documents, easily copy paper documents from one piece of paper to another, and easily put paper documents back into digital form. 6. It’s incredibly cheap. 7. The right kinds of paper stored properly last a really really long time (centuries if not millennia). 8. It is light and portable, can be stuck up pretty much anywhere. 9. It requires no batteries, no legacy systems, no software updates, no expensive equipment, no special training, .... 10. It is its own concrete physical record, which can be effectively checked for tampering and made difficult to forge at scale. (Hence use for money, ballots, contracts, titles, ...)

mysterypie 9y ago
> rulers, compasses, french curves, pantographs, planimeters I had never heard of a planimeter[1], but what a fascinating device it is! I'm surprised that such a thing is possible: that you can calculate the area of an arbitrarily complex shape just by tracing the perimeter with a simple mechanical device. Unfortunately, how it works is not at all intuitive but seems to require a fair amount of math to understand. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planimeter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planimeter
- jacobolus 9y ago
  If you have ever studied vector calculus, the idea is a straightforward application of Green's theorem. The discrete version is the 'shoelace formula'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoelace_formula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoelace_formula This kind of thing is one of the more important ideas from 19th century math/physics, and is studied by most STEM undergraduates in their first or second year.
- progval 9y ago
  I know a researcher (Olivier Bournez) who uses the planimeter as an introduction to analog computing. His claim is that planimeters are single-purpose analog computers, much like calculators are single-purpose digital computers. He then logically generalizes planimeters into General purpose analog computers, which I find quite fascinating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_analog_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_analog_compute...
- jaclaz 9y ago
  >I had never heard of a planimeter[1], but what a fascinating device it is! Not only, it was (is) extremely accurate if used properly. I am old enough (unfortunately) to have used planimeters professionally in the '80's (just before drawing started becoming digital), at the time they were largely used because they were much faster than calculating exactly (and already hand calculators with trigonometric functions existed) some data in roads cross-sections. So, for temporary accounting, planimeter based measures of areas were accepted (usually reduced by 5% or 10%). Basically you had a (hand drawn) inked drawing of each cross section of the road (usually one every 20 m or so) where you would draw a pencil line at the level that was reached in the works, and then use the planimeter to get the area (and consequently volume) of the earthworks done at the date. When the level was final, the amount would be calculated analitically, still manually, usually, but I managed somehow to write for the HP97[1][2] (constrained by 256 steps!) a small program capable of automatically calculating that, of course typing the measures manually. Large stretches of the road earthworks had already been calculated by the planimeter and when re-calculated, the differences were very small, within 1% or 2%. [1] http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp6797.htm http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp6797.htm [2] http://www.hpmuseum.org/97.jpg http://www.hpmuseum.org/97.jpg

mattmanser 9y ago

Depends what you mean by paper. Toilet paper, cardboard boxes, sales packaging, food packaging, etc. Are they paper? Just looking up paper usage worldwide, there's been no decline over the last 10 years[1], it's been flat. before that, though I'm having trouble pinning down. There's also this[2] which claims there is no significant decline in the type of paper you're talking about. I find that hard to believe though given what I remember about offices in the 2000s. [1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/270317/production-volume-of-paper-by-type/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/270317/production-volume... [2]http://www.thepaperlessproject.com/facts-about-paper-the-impact-of-consumption/ http://www.thepaperlessproject.com/facts-about-paper-the-imp...

krapp 9y ago

Paper was useful a thousand years ago, people find paper useful today, and it's likely people will find it useful a thousand years hence. The digital device you're using, the operating system it's running, and any apps running on it will likely be considered obsolete garbage within a year.

zwischenzug 9y ago
Within a year? Seriously?
- krapp 9y ago
  Fair enough, maybe that was a bit hyperbolic. An electronic device still wouldn't be useful as long as paper, at least not for the average person. There's no planned obsolescence or EOL with paper.
  - zwischenzug 9y ago
    Most of the books I own will crumble to dust in 100 years, I understand. That said, so will most data formats.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    So what? I have an MP3 file on my laptop that I first downloaded in 1999. Who cares if the physical support that encodes it is long gone? It's not like we're going to give up on using computers even if we do keep using paper, so there's no savings there, only extra waste.

ggg9990 9y ago

Because virtually all previous forms of media are still in (limited) use, so paper is unlikely to be an exception.

lr4444lr 9y ago

Private contracts with huge risk fallout should there be either unauthorized viewing, copying, or modification, are highly useful to keep on paper. All parties get one or more copies, and they can be put into physical safe deposit boxes. This helps prevent or at least better assign liability to catastrophic events like deed fraud. If county governments with poor IT security should have an undetected breach, it could be a real mess without a paper trail.

proginthebox 9y ago

The low technical nature of paper is a huge factor.

cube00 9y ago
The new version will just be nano bots holding hands.

flogic 9y ago

I once did a thought experiment on what it would take to replace the paper scoring sheets for horse competition. It was fairly daunting. It needs to be simple enough for a lay person to use well. Recording, corrections, and commenting all needed to seamless. Since there are multiple riders on course, the user needs to be able to react quickly and potentially out of order. Paper is really hard to beat in that case. Corrections are just using the pencil eraser or crossing out. Field selection is just where you have the pen at that moment. Communication sucks in that the sheets are picked up by a runner. But even on that count going digital adds it's own complications. I assume that someone will do it eventually but for such a seemingly simple case the constraints are deceptively tight.

fny 9y ago
Why is digital paper not an option here? If we're talking about a timeline of 100 years, I'm almost certain we'll have something thin, reusable, with low power that you can write on with a stylus. After all, we're almost there today: we're just missing the thin part.[0][1][2] [0]: http://myboogieboard.com/ http://myboogieboard.com/ [1]: http://remarkable.com http://remarkable.com [2]: http://noteslate.com/ http://noteslate.com/