Why a ‘paperless world’ still hasn’t happened
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
- We don't send physical letters in envelopes anymore, we send emails.
- We don't send documents via fax or courier, we send them digitally.
- We don't apply for jobs by mailing in resumes, we apply online.
- We don't file taxes or other applications using snail mail, we send them online.
- We don't receive statements and invoices in our mailbox, we get them in our inbox.
- We don't send photocopies, we send pictures.
- We don't use checks or even currency notes, we use credit cards.
- We don't read physical newspapers, we read articles online via HN.
- We don't read physical books, we read e-books.
Yes yes, I know people still do some of the above things. But the quantity of paper-use for the above has fallen precipitously, and it's falling even further everyday.
I still use pen-and-paper occasionally to sketch out my thoughts in an unstructured way, and I do like sending letters as a gesture of my extended effort. But for any kind of business dealing or inter-person interaction, paper is on life-support, and is going to be DOA in another decade or two. And everytime I think of paper statements and requests for photocopies to be mailed in, all I can say is good riddance.
I'm not sure what the indicators of this would be, for or against, but extrapolating the current trend to zero seems premature.
I can see paper use continuing it's rapid decline, but I genuinely believe it will plateau at a relatively high level. I think paper will always have it's place, in some fashion.
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.
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, ...)
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_analog_compute...
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 [2] http://www.hpmuseum.org/97.jpg
11. Your whole organization won't likely ever be brought on its knees by a virus or ransomware attached to a piece of paper or fax.
12. Even if your device batteries are low, or you are in a blackout, the piece of paper can still be read [1]
[1] This is specific to plane tickets/boarding passes, I have been mocked for printing them by the same people that had it on their smartphone (and I already saw it happen twice that the battery/device died at the time of boarding/passing checks)
12. this doesn't get solved with paper copies because the workers still won't know what needs to be done because at least half of the documents will be digital. They will at most be able to organize their paper copies, which is something which wouldn't be necessary if they'd gone digital-only.
your plane ticket/boarding pass mention is also flawed. You will eventually get into trouble if you have a single point of failure. It doesn't matter if its a paper or a phone on which the data is stored. A paper can get damaged or lost just as well as a phone's battery can die at an inopportune time. Thankfully, you're not limited to a single copy nowadays. Its easy to a. print the ticket for security and b. use the app for check-in
And as well, the same people who lose the paper ticket (or have it stolen) may well have lost their smartphone (or I would say with some more probabilities, have it stolen).
But I appreciate the single point of failure note.
Its amazing what humans were/are able to do with paper though. It just won't be as relevant as technology advances.
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...
[2]http://www.thepaperlessproject.com/facts-about-paper-the-imp...
After all, we're almost there today: we're just missing the thin part.[0][1][2]
Paper survies the absence of humans, software and devices dont. Operating systems decay, reading software and devices wither away, the revenue stream drys up and soon a whole eco-system decays from a oasis of data back to the dust it came.
We know how frail and vurnerable the whole affair is, deep down. That is why we use ink to sign important contracts, that is why we store copys at seperat places. We would burn them in clay so they outloast us, if we still had a comfortable way to do so.
There is a market for durable softare there, for durable hardware, for the guarantee to withstand times tests. But in the end, it would be a lot- like paper made from sand.
Except... this isn't true. Right now is considered the golden age of board games. Just this past year somewhere between 3000 and 4000 new board games were released. Every one of these use paper in abundance.
We're technically Millennials (though early ones). I went to my first convention this year (with one other person from same circle of friends) and it was for board games. It was social, it was fun, every single person I met there was awesome. I'll probably go to the same one next year. I'd never go to a video game con, however much I like video games.
- Sent mail for something requiring physical proof and evidence of delivery like court related correspondence.
- Sent fax to financial institution demanding medallion signature; they have an app but didn't work.
- Not for a job but for applying for credit, had to send in identifying information via mail.
- Any tax situation that is slightly complicated involves forms not available for eFile, guess what, paper forms.
- Still get tax forms in mail, it's a paper trail that won't disappear in 1, 2, 7, or 10 years and then have to pay $25 to retrieve; plus long-term safe, secure storage of readable data is difficult.
- Not sure what the difference is here; photocopiers are scanners.
- Still use checks for rent because landlords don't care to be raped by processor fees.
- Hotel sends paper WSJ and USA Today every day.
- Physical books, especially textbooks, are everywhere since eReaders can't render math worth sh*t; nobody reads anything serious, e.g. academic literature on eReaders, so it's print and mark up.
Paper is far from dead since there is no replacement for some of these things or the replacement is worse or expensive.
Electronic statements are particularly nasty because the bank might make records older than 24 or 36 months inaccessible and then charge you to retrieve them unless you thought ahead to download your statement PDF each month. Not that that has stopped me from going paperless for day-to-day things but I am rather fond of collecting and filing tax forms on paper.
I do it each year for free.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...
False. There are free options.
Having a piece of software do that calculations for me, and even enter most of my information, based on my already-electronic W-2, is worth a good bit of money to me anyhow. Even with software guiding me, I've got to have a couple of hours free to file my taxes.
We still send messages via fax, because a document you sign and send by email isn't a legally signed document, wheras a fax is. I had to print out a PDF, sign it, and and fax it a week ago for this reason.
There is technology to do true cryptographic digital signatures (not these fake "digital" signatures), but society doesn't seem particularly interested in that at the moment.
For thieves.
Just like with the "job-stealing automation", despite the hysteria in the press. These things take decades.
We don't read physical books, we read e-books.
I do, and really e-ink displays were truly a revelation to me, but it's not a book. Ok I'm one of those people who crave the feeling of well-designed materials/tools/things/whatever and some books fullfill that perfectly in a way no e-book-reader will ever do: a properly bound hardcover weighing over a kg and packed with information on a subject I care about? Gimme! But even for more 'normal' people: I'm wondering how many of those are saying 'I've got an e-book now, haven't read any paper books since'? I know none, but that's just anecdotal of course, they all say 'e-book is nice, but ...'. Not saying that cannot change. But a couple of decades? I'll be extremely surprised. And in any case, I'll still have and use many of the physical books I have now.
My Kindle has 1,029 books on it at the moment... though at least 50% of those are fanfiction, which I prefer to original books.
For Buffy fans, [1] has a huge number of stories, both in-universe and crossovers with other worlds. [1a] to [1e] are a few of my favorite authors. Hotpoint's crossover between X-COM and SG-1 is absolutely amazing.
For other worlds, [2] to [5] are the most well-known sites for fanfiction. One of my favorite stories is [6].
===
What I normally do is I download the stories in the .mobi format - tth and ao3 have that feature in the site, and for the others you can use the FanFicFare plugin for Calibre - and then upload them to my Kindle. This allows me to read in bed, which is bad for my sleep but I like it :)
===
By the way, English isn't my maternal language either - reading a lot of stuff on the internet is pretty much how I learned it.
[1a] https://www.tthfanfic.org/Author-3980/Speakertocustomers.htm
[1b] https://www.tthfanfic.org/Author-7859/becuzitswrong.htm
[1c] https://www.tthfanfic.org/Author-15310/Cordyfan.htm
[1d] https://www.tthfanfic.org/Author-22082/DianeCastle.htm
[1e] https://www.tthfanfic.org/Author-7284/Hotpoint.htm
[2] https://www.fanfiction.net
[3] https://forums.spacebattles.com/
[4] https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com
[5] http://archiveofourown.org/
[6] https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/taylor-varga-w...
The babyboomers are on their way out. They're the people born right after WWII and they're in their 50/60/70s. They were born in a world where TV at home was a novelty. They witnessed the smartphone revolution in their late adulthood.
When people who grow up in our current society, with the changes as you put, become adult without the old reference then we will see how important something like pen and pencil remain. And how usable will it be? For example, when I had to scribble down notes the other day, my handwriting was even more abysmal than it used to be because of a lack of practice.
The movie Er Ist Wieder Da (which I saw recently on Netflix) where Hitler returns in Germany in the 21st century and gets confronted with a changed Germany also articulates these changes.
And file storage and manipulation is still in the Stone Age. It's about as far from perfect as any technology can be. To kill paper you have to make it perfectly easy for people to design applications without it. Because it's already perfectly easy to design applications and systems that use paper.
We have to fix software development before we can truly kill paper.
Systems like Dropbox are a good first step, but the archival of files is still far too complicated. This stuff needs to be easy enough for your 80 year old grandma to master.
I'd say we're probably 20-50 years out. We're eventually going to figure out a basic file format that all applications will use and extend. Then it'll become necessary for all applications to support it. It'll have solved the encoding problem, and it'll have built-in error correction.
Sort of a Unicode for file formats.
Once that's in place, then cloud storage and backup solutions will finally become useful.
For example, my wife is syncing several GBs of data up to Google Photos as we speak. Periodically, the sync process will complain about something and stop. There is nothing we can do except ask it to exit and we try again. What went wrong? Who knows. We certainly don't. The app UI isn't telling us anything. So we cross our fingers, restart the sync app and hope it works. This isn't the future.
"A file" needs to be have the qualities we need as a paper-replacement as an intrinsic property of itself, not conceptual software design properties that are merely abstractions.
Application code should never need to worry about error recovery.
We're kind of close to this for text files, if only Windows and related programs would join the rest of the sane world. Stop adding 'BOM Marks' and just assume everything is UTF-8 (at least for any txt file created after 2000 and all application stdin/out/errs).
However the biggest barrier here is a complete disconnect between interested parties. Adobe wants to make money and keeps 'pdf' locked away. It's also bad because paper size is enforced, instead of having an aspect ratio, and positioning for different elements. Even HTML rendering isn't that simple, and NO designer is working using those tools. Additionally that complexity is FAR above what the average user can handle and WAY above what they want to deal with even if they can.
Any format which /is/ user friendly will have to support things like 'drawings' / sketches which may or may not be auto OCRed for searching.
I'm of the opinion that this won't really be solved until we have //strong// AI to do transcription and formatting for the lazy humans.
The general trend seems to skip that and is moving towards renting hosted software applications. Google docs is already pervasive in certain corners, and not only can I not tell you what version of Google docs I'm using, but I can't really tell you what its file formats are, or even where it's even actually stored other than "in the cloud".
Assuming that trend continues, what, then, even are file formats?
We need a universal file format similar to plaintext but has standards-based extensions for storing data in that all applications can extract to. That way software can finally achieve paper's universality.
It's the first step on the road to making information technology truly worthy of the name. The next would be easy-to-use programming platforms. Like Excel or Visual Basic but not shitty.
A bare minimum requirement for me would be, "a computer can be reasonably expected to open the file". Yes, a computer without the correct application installed could not reasonably be expected to open the file. But here is a computer, perfectly capable of displaying the file, but choosing not to do so. Note that these are not files that are created with the new Keynote that I may not have installed. These are normal Keynote files created in the same version I have - but now my version isn't good enough to open files any more, it would seem.
A piece of paper would never do that.
I disagree.
I write my presentations in Org. Perfectly readable even to peooole without Emacs.
I do my accounting using hledger. Perfectly readable etc.
I do my $task using ${plain text format}, peefectly readble even to people without ${tool that helps me format the document nicely}. Etc.
Sharing files is unbelievably inconvenient. Sharing files to my mum in the other room involves copying files to a USB drive and moving them manually, after I reformat a USB to ntfs or fat32. It doesn't matter that both of our computers are on a LAN because by default we have no pre-existing convenient ways to share files. With her being on Windows and me being on GNU/Linux, I'm not even sure which program I would pick if I could install one. For anyone that isn't in USB drive proximity, I have to brainstorm a solution every single time I want to share a file for every person I want to give it too. This is all despite the fact that theoretically, there are a million different ways that we could share a file.
When you are in the same room or even city, I should be able to just move large amounts of data from one computer to a physically adjacent computer without having to go through the internet.
For long distance transfers, I agree with various cloud storage. Upload some files and create a share link. But even this is an annoyance for a large file.
Most home routers have dynamic DNS updates enabled, so the only instruction for the other side is "put $hostname into your browser window", sometimes followed by a "prefix it with http://" if their browser insists on searching Google for that name.
It requires some effort and knowledge on my side but tends to work pretty well for the other person. Even better when you have some instant messaging channel available where you can just send a direct link.
python -mSimpleHTTPServer
Information stored on paper in some filing cabinet in some office for all practical purposes simply doesn't exist. It can't be easily searched, retrieved or accessed by someone who's not in the same room and doesn't exactly know what he's looking for. In other words: That information is lost.
Old habits unfortunately die hard, which is why people still seem to be thinking that storing non-ephemeral information or knowledge on paper is a good idea.
To a lot of people in a lot of scenarios, that is a feature. Modern cryptography has yet to match the ease of use, comfort and security of a single piece of paper locked away somewhere only you would think to look.
We can't just take information and dump it on a block storage device. It needs proper archival. This is the same with paper, only if you lose the key to your file cabinet or the drawers stop sliding so easily, you can still get at the information.
If your RAID backplane dies and you don't know how to fix it, you're in for a bad day.
There is a skillset you can learn to work with paper more efficiently. But most people can muddle through without those skills. Not so with digital.
In my experience, it's not just about archival, search and retrieval. The system also needs to have robust automation capabilities, and be able to do things like automatically rename the files in a consistent way based on storage location, file content (text, voice, etc.), and identify when people store things in the incorrect location and correct those mistakes or at least flag the files for manual correction.
The other thing to realize is that information doesn't get generated in a vacuum. It's generated via various business processes. So if you can automate those using software, and the automation routines are tied to the content management system such that things are filed in the correct location based on business process data (e.g. which department initiated the process, who approved what, etc.) then you're basically 80% of the way to paperlessness.
There was also a project by MoMA (I can't find the original article), where they had to get a whole team together to create formats that will ensure survival in the future by doing things like including the instructions to view the format in a readable way.
Office365, GSuite. Small and medium businesses have options.
I worked on a pretty huge paper to electronic record conversion project... millions of pages. We made it much easier to access, although about 25x more expensive, but 95% of searches align with the indexing systems in place for the paper process.
Even in my life, I use a traditional 43 folders system for some things. Very accessible.
Still, there's the fundamental problem with paper-based system that when you design an indexing system you have to correctly anticipate how people will use the system for the foreseeable future (i.e. until the next reorganization).
It's much easier to find scientific books and papers online than by using IR systems in university libraries designed for exactly that purpose by librarians, whose entire profession is built on organising information. The reason for this isn't that those librarians don't know how to do their job. It's that information stored on paper alone (i.e. without a digital representation) can't be easily searched for.
You can't find anything if you don't know what you're looking for, be it through a search box or a pile of drawers filled with paper. A search engine is just a sophisticated index. Information, in any form, is only retrievable once a certain hierarchy is imposed upon it (be it scarce or not) and some sort of index is there (be it in your mind---the invoice is in New Folder (3)---or actually written down somewhere, or somehow generated and operated by a search tool). Yes you certainly can't grep paper (you can try though, there's OCR if one wants to go to those lengths, and that certainly can be useful for lots of tasks, even in the personal scale), but you can't grep your text files if you don't have a search term at hand.
Additionally, there is no better read experience than paper. And consider archiving: digital documents are much harder to preserve than paper documents, and this has enormous implications for public policy, history, and democracy.
Paper (and pen) have stood the test of time for thousands of years. Warped tech nuts believe they can be replaced by substandard junk electronics. I'm glad consumers aren't so gullible.
Paper is slowly but surely going away. We just finished digitizing all our employee records; all records from now on will be digital. We used to print reams of reports and store them in filing cabinets, shelves, etc but we don't do that anymore. We aren't paperless but it's been a slow and steady march for decades now.
Paperless workers need two large high-res monitors, not one crappy 21" 1080p monitor or a laptop with a 1366x768 panel. They need at least one tablet with a decent pen interface. They need a good document management system. They need the training and support to make use of it all.
I do though believe we eventually will create computers which are as natural for us to use as paper is today.
Paper is far from perfect, but it does have some features that certain business processes have come to rely on which files lack. For example: the ability to physically bind an authorization (a signature) to the information that authorization is associated with by putting both on the same sheet of paper.
Paper also doesn't require batteries. It's much more robust in the face of certain kinds of physical abuse.
But paper takes a lot more space to store, and it's a lot harder to transfer from one place to another.
I'm not sure what it would take to replace that. Working on paper allows me to disconnect from the digital world and concentrate on logic, it also allows me to organize my information physically.
Maybe a very advanced augmented reality system could offer me everything there plus the ability to hang my post-it notes in mid-air. I'd give that a whirl.
How about a device not connected to the internet?
It is an expensive solution for sure, but as that kind of technology becomes cheaper, the use case you describe for paper will be reduced as well.
I have managed to get rid of some paper usage by having multiple dry erase boards of various sizes. One digital solution I have considered is something like the boogie board. If you're not familiar, it's basically a 10 inch digital whiteboard that can save the screen to an image and costs around $20. That's cheap enough I could have a pile of them and mostly replicate my current process.
I think it’s a better long term solution than the boogie boards because it has handwriting recognition and it’s seamless + synced to the cloud without you doing anything. Also, the 120hz refresh rate on the new displays make it behave closer to the physical experience than on past displays where there was a short lag between your stroke and the stroke appearing on screen.
The boogie board is also a great solution if most of your notebooks are meant to be throwaway scratchpads. It might be a better solution than iPad if you don’t intend on keeping the stuff you sketch out. Plus it’s cheaper like you said.
All I’m saying is that it’s something worth trying out at the very least since you can try it with no cost. It’s been working very well for me.
Look back a few decades and people used to have shelves full of manuals and binders full of product specs. The cubicle designs are totally different now, partly because we don't have all that printed stuff to deal with.
There's a chasm of complexity between paper and its alternatives. In addition, we already have tons of experience using paper, along with the knowledge of how it should be handled and preserved.
I suspect that much data will be lost due to bit rot, proprietary formats, legacy adapters, DRM, etc. AFAIK, we're still figuring out how long data can be safely stored in many of these newer mediums.
IMO, it's highly desirable to have both options available. I don't really want everything I do passing through computers over which I have no control.
This really increases my recall and understanding of what was discussed. I've tried digital equivalents of this and it just doesn't work the same for me.
I have noticed that this type of thing is more prevalent with people in my age group (40+). Writing things down, even if you throw it away right afterwards, seems to increase recall more than typing it.
Your intuition here is spot on and backed up by actual research:
https://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-students-...
Something without the need to compile a million dependencies and setting up a DBMS.
Ideal process would be: scan to folder, tool runs cleanup and OCR, creates searchable PDF (perhaps with a nice file name) moves to archive folder, done.
Ideas would be more than welcome :)
Guess what one fucking feature it didn't have?
That's right! You couldn't just dial another whiteboard on the network and start immediately drawing together with another person.
(Ironically, when I tried to demonstrate this issue to one of our IT folks, the damn smartboard refused to start right up because it needed to install a firmware upgrade - that provided this functionality.)
It's so far the best of both worlds of paper and electronics.
Bit pricey though.
(I haven't been paid, reimbursed, or otherwise incentivized for this in any way, except that I think it's cool and I want it to be successful.)
If there's to be a universal "digital paper", it would need a lot of planning and agreement. With the amount of churn of stuff in technology these days I don't see anything stable enough to "replace paper" anytime soon.
Thinking about this problem reminds me of the transition from linotype machines at the New York Times, to fully computerised systems in 1978.
The computer systems are shown at the end of the wonderful documentary 'Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu' https://vimeo.com/127605643#t=24m55s
The amount of thought and preparation put into those systems, and the thought and preparation put into the change from ink-and-metal to pixels-and-bytes seems remarkable. Perhaps the (lack of) co-ordination between hardware and software today is to blame? Many industries have their IT problems handled with software-only solutions, generally with little thought for what the solution will look like 10--or even 5--years down the road.
I would love to hear from people in industries like medical software, and flight software; where thought and preparation is--hopefully--given some budget and priority.
Faxes are deeply misunderstood, I still occasionally have vendors and clients say "we need an original" or "we need a signature" or some other brain damaging excuse. And these aren't companies in the sticks that don't know it's 2018, these are large (legacy) companies in big cities.
1. Only My paper bank statements posted to me are correct.
My bank statements printed off from the internet and replacement ones posted out are incorrect.
The interest income earned is only shown on the correct dates on the original paper copies posted out, all the others the interest dates are shown in the incorrect month and thus don't match up what should be shown in my income tax return and don't agree with the interest summary by the bank.
2. Only my original posted Credit card statements are guaranteed correct.
I have had changes made by the bank IN PREVIOUS FINANCIAL YEARS!!!! on the online versions of my statements, such as changes to amounts paid!!!!
Without the original paper copies I could never argue my case.
Maybe the laws has to change too. Many laws & processes still needs ink seal and signatures. A digital signature or a digital photo is not enough.
I could see binding 100 of them together that you could 'flash' to create a true e-book
I reckon at least 10 garbage bags worth of paper a day at least from one store alone. Maybe I'll run some quick numbers later on.
Paperless in that case would be gold. Just email my receipts so I can archive 'em because I'll only ever need them in the future, not the present.
I hate dealing with paper. I especially hate it when it is redundant. Hate it with a passion.
Of itself, and in the way we function, cognitively (e.g. spacial orientation).
P.S. Thank god they still haven't managed to make it blink at me. Harry Potter and his animated pictures, be damned! ;-)