There are some social paradigms that we simply take for granted, because they have been around for so long. When I was a kid, if you wanted to meet a friend in the park on Sunday afternoon, you had to go to the park. There was no option of sending a text message to change your plans. Such a thing would be unthinkable to people from a younger generation.
To me the most interesting aspect of this is the fact that I never thought that anything was missing. I wasn’t thinking about a time in the future when I would have some new capability. It seemed perfectly reasonable that I would need to show up at the park, without the option of changing plans.
In the future, there will be new capabilities that we will simply take for granted which we’re not even thinking about now, because they are not yet possible. For example, when we are all wearing those augmented reality specs, you and I will be able to have a private conversation in a public place. We will both be able to see and hear things that no one around us will be able to see or hear.
This will be taken for granted as a normal part of social communication. People from a younger generation will find it difficult to believe that anybody could have ever got along without it