Which technology do you think will die out, and which one will probably change our lives?
Over the past one, 2, or even 3 decades, technological development has accelerated dramatically thanks to the digital revolution.
– But some technologies generate a lot of hype and still don’t seem to have reached mass adoption or shown enough long-term potential. For example, that’s how I currently see wearable glasses.
– On the other hand, technologies and concepts like the internet, social media, artificial intelligence, and perhaps even Bitcoin have already had a profound impact on society.
Which technological inventions do you think have little chance of succeeding and will eventually fade away?
And then, is there any emerging technology that you believe will have a major impact on the future?
1. Personally, I think the current concept of wearables may eventually lose momentum.
2. And I believe AI-powered robots have enormous potential, especially in areas such as logistics and the military.
Replies
Two for me.
Dying out: consumer wearables as branded hardware. The sensors will survive, absorbed into phones and cheaper devices. What will not survive is the idea that people pay a premium specifically for a dedicated device. Utility wins; lifestyle accessories lose when the utility becomes fungible.
What will change how we live: ambient health monitoring at population scale. Continuous biometric data, once trustworthy and cheap, shifts how we understand chronic illness and recovery. We have been guessing about sleep quality and physiological stress for centuries. Now we actually measure them. Most apps currently ignore what the sensors already capture. That is a temporary gap.
I say that as someone building in the recovery space: the data exists. What lags is what you do with it.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@oshylabs Do you think that phones will be replaced by any other devices?
@busmark_w_nika Not replaced, displaced. The phone wins because it does forty jobs at once in one pocketable slab, and nothing yet matches that bundle. Glasses and wearables peel off single jobs, glanceable info, payments, health sensing, but each one still has to beat reaching into your pocket, and most do not. My bet is the phone slowly becomes the hub and dumber endpoints cluster around it, rather than one device dethroning it. Attention is the scarce thing, and a screen in your hand still commands it better than anything on your face.
Dies out: the standalone smartwatch as its own category. It won't disappear, it just becomes a sensor feeding something else instead of a device you interact with. Hard to justify a screen on your wrist when the phone does more. Same goes for most single-purpose wearables.
Changes our lives: AI agents. Not the chatbot you type into, the kind that goes off and does multi-step work on its own.
The part I find more interesting than robots: once agents use the internet themselves, they become users of it. In a few years a business will have more agents touching digital services than employees. The web was built for people, and the main users are about to be machines, with almost none of the plumbing built yet (no way to tell an agent from a human, no pricing for machine-speed usage, no trust layer between them).
That gap is where the real building happens this decade.
On robots, agree on logistics. Military I'd be slower on, less about the tech, more about how slow procurement is.
What made you call out glasses specifically?
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@nipuntaneja I called out glasses because it was first like a "metaverse" idea – but you can see how the metaverse ended? It simply ended; Meta shut down the project despite lots of money invested.
I feel like an obvious answer is television. I cannot imaging TV surviving much longer. But the broadcasting companies will still exist, which is why they are looking for ways to transform and modernise their footage archives and production pipelines. This is what we are building :)
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@sean_mcfadden I do not know; there was one study on how people started using streaming services and YouTube more on television. Or do you mean "broadcast TV"?
I think it’s less about specific technologies “failing” and more about certain form factors not surviving in their current hype stage.
For example, some wearables might not disappear, but the idea of constantly wearing extra devices on your body could fade if everything gets absorbed into phones, earbuds, or ambient AI. A lot of glasses or wrist based concepts may end up as transitional products rather than the final interface.
Historically, what tends to fade is anything that:
• adds friction to daily life instead of removing it
• requires constant attention or charging
• duplicates something a phone already does well
• lacks a clear “must use daily” reason
So it’s not that the category dies, it just gets compressed or absorbed into something more seamless.
On the flip side, the technologies that tend to reshape everything are the ones that become invisible infrastructure.
AI is already in that phase. The next step is it moving from “tool you use” → “system that acts for you.”
Robotics is interesting in that context because it connects intelligence to the physical world. If AI is the brain, robotics is the hands. Logistics, manufacturing, agriculture, defense, and elder care are all areas where that combination becomes extremely powerful once cost and reliability cross a threshold.
If I had to summarize:
• Wearables may struggle if they stay “extra devices” instead of becoming invisible
• AI agents + robotics have a higher ceiling because they reduce human workload in both digital and physical environments
The biggest shift won’t be one specific gadget winning. It will be when intelligence stops being a product you open and becomes a layer embedded into everything around you
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@md_khayruzzaman Okay, some wearables can survive (rings, watches) to track health data and maybe have it like "jewellery" or something aesthetic to our outfit. Otherwise, that's all purpose I can see behind it.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@mohamed_ait_ahmed What payments prevail in your bubble? Because I use QR codes for payments hahaha
Honestly, I've given up on VR headsets at this point. Bought one full of excitement, now it's been collecting dust for months. The immersion is real, but it's just too bulky and impractical for everyday use.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@kevin_xu01 Can't imagine paying 3K for those by Apple or how much it was :D
One thing I remember from years ago, centered around the original space race - the USA spent millions developing a biro which would work in space, the Russians took a pencil. It is very easy to look at technology and think that is obsolete because it is old and not as shiny or impressive, but sometimes old is still good!
1. Plastic anything should be replaced!
2. Bio tech and longevity technology will become boom industries...
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@mark_trowbridge Re 2 – Bryan Johnson is working on this :D
dying out. the resume. it had a 70 year run. it cannot survive an era where an AI writes 50 perfect ones a minute. signal collapses to zero. changing our lives. portable signed credentials. a peer signature on a piece of work with reputational cost attached. an AI cannot manufacture that. the credential of the next decade has to come from a human who put their name on it. building TAM Network for exactly that.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@thenameisarian In the AI era when every human is replaced... no resume will be needed :D
@busmark_w_nika ha. and someone still has to vouch for what the AI shipped. the receipt format has an agent identity row that names the AI contributor and the percentage of the work. transparency on which row was AI is the actual must-have credential of the next decade. v2 ships with it from day one.
shut down completely? no. regulate heavily? probably. the Anthropic Europe situation shows that the real risk isn't humanity deciding to stop AI, it's governments deciding who gets access to it and who doesn't. the 16% stat is interesting but I think most people are scared of AI they don't understand, not AI they actually use. once you've used it to solve a real problem in your workflow you don't want to go back. the genie isn't going back in the bottle but the bottle might get a lot of new rules about who can open it
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@tina_chhabra But just imagine not having it; people will be at the beginning helpless, because many have learnt to live with it.
I guess the thing that’s actually going to change daily life in a big way is AI that’s baked into everything — not just chatbots, but systems that handle work, planning, coding, customer service, even personal admin in the background without you really noticing. Once it’s embedded into operating systems, apps, and devices, it’ll feel less like a “tool” and more like how software just works.
If I had to stretch a bit further out, robotics in real-world spaces (delivery, elderly care, basic labor) feels like the next big shift after that — but that one’s slower because it needs hardware to catch up with the software side.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@iam_sama in online, it is already happening with AI agents... but robotics will be a different level, esp. in the industries you named.