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Comment by cdubzzz | Hacker News Reader

Lately I’ve been wondering if an upcoming generation is going to be more anti-technology, or at least anti-smartphone. I’ve got a 2.5 year old who will occasionally say, “put your phone down, daddy”, or even swipe it from my hand (though we of course try to discourage that, hah) when I’m not paying enough attention to him. As he has grown up and started doing this, it has made me much more aware of my phone time and generally decreased my usage. He clearly notices when I do use it and doesn’t like it if he’s expecting me to engage more with him. I’m curious if this will lead to him seeing smartphone use as some sort of uncool adult thing.

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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"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I think we've become so addicted to smartphones because they are new and shiny, quite a leap from technology we knew over the last 20/30/40 years.

Children born with smartphones around see them as ordinary and probably less addicting, it's what comes next we need to worry about for them.

Aanecdata I know, but I have a couple of young nieces (7 and 11) and they are definitely as addicted to smartphones (/iPad) as you can reasonably get.

Edit: Observing their behaviour, and my own (and other adults), I'd speculate that they are inherently addictive rather than simply new and shiny (I don't view them that way any more). To be honest, I find this pretty self evident.

Additional Anecdata: I was actually kind of disturbed by how addicted by little brother (18) was to his phone when he came to visit. We had to make a house rule that you put down the phone when watching a movie. We then laughed at how he seemed to be actually twitching and jonesing for the thing.

At one point, we paused the movie due to an ambulance outside, and the boy lept from the couch to his phone to get his little fix.

Based on how incredibly obsessed some children I know under 10 are with smartphones, tablets and even using my phone, no. Definitely not.

People don't use phones to look cool or generally don't think about the style of using a device. It's not a trend people are following. They want the entertainment, function or stimulation from the device. So if electronics somehow become unstimulating, boring or useless to children, maybe then.

smartphones' fate will be similar to television, television provided a new cool way to access content than newspapers/magazines, then came the smartphones which provided even better content which was easily accessible. My point being unless they(upcoming generation) get something that provides better content and ways to access it or they realize that instant access to information is bad, they wont be anti-smartphone.

I think my generation (millenial) and the generation after (zoomer?) is explicitly anti-television on average, compared to at least the 2 generations that came before us. Sure, Netflix, but I have no friends that engage in the act of coming home from work, sitting down, and letting Comcast and Fox/ABC/whoever decide what they'll be watching in 5 minute slices between 8 minute commercial breaks (or that's how it felt the last time I tried watching TV). I think that's an important development in increasing user freedom, the simple act of choosing what content we fill our leisure time with, and moving away from a barrage of consumerist propaganda.

On the other hand, I have fond memories of watching TV with my family - all of us in the same room having conversations about what has happening on the screen. That is valuable family time and it gets lost a bit with current consumption patterns.

Netflix/streaming also encourages large stretches of being glued to the screen, which isn't always great.

We do the same thing, but with videos of children falling over

Without context, it's hard to say... But I don't think you should feel guilty for looking at your phone while playing with your child.

Children will always want all of your attention, and their play is frankly mind-numbing. Due to the COVID situation, I am entertaining my toddler 14 hours a day 5 days a week and I find it impossible to stay engaged for more than a few minutes playing a child's game.

I think (hope) that future generations will look at how we consume media on smartphones today the way we look at cigarette smoking now. An unhealthy stimulant that many of us are addicted to and struggle to escape.

Just as cigarette companies heavily railed against any anti-smoking effort; media companies will do the same.

My daughter says the same, but today in a play she requested a phone for her next birthday.

Not trying to be flippant, but going at what kids do - probably copy your behaviour while at the same time feel it's an uncool thing. :-/

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