But possibly there will be a better way to treat/cure cancer, and thus chemotherapy will be seen as similar to how we today see bloodletting or lobotomy.
Poison the cancer slightly faster than the whole organism! My dad cancer treatment gave him liver disease that eventually turned into a cancer that was way more deadly than his original cancer.
I legitimately do not understand why so many people refuse to drink tap water. I get that an occasional bottle of water is convenient when traveling or something, but some of my neighbors seem to only drink bottled water even at home. The city will literally test your water for free if you don't trust it for some reason.
20 years is a bit short but... Eating animals will be regarded as highly immoral, "but everyone knew those animals suffered, right?", on the same level as we now judge slavery
This is farfetched. People love meat, and we have for our entire history. Even India only has around 30% vegetarian population. The demand for not just protein but specifically meat will never go away.
The only way I see us avoiding animal slaughter is by mastering bioengineering to the point where we can grow a perfectly marbled brisket in a lab without actually cloning the whole cow.
As is, one can only hope. Until a source of animal-like protein can be perfected and become cheap enough for sustained consumption by a lower class individual, some people (more than you realize) will not be able to get off animal proteins due to various medical conditions. I suppose accessible cures for these conditions would be a proper solution as well.
I'm not even going to touch on the luxury of choosing your next meal here, since that's been addressed already.
I hope it will be considered insane that we pump livestock full of them as a preventative measure, rather than as a treatment, while also prescribing them for every little thing.
When our current antibiotics are no longer effective at all, I hope that we'll be able to find new ones and that we'll be much more responsible with their use. I hope that people in the future will be as incredulous at our current use of them, as we are of using arsenic in makeup.
That's true. They already evolved and most of us didn't even realize. News feeds were added and gradually evolved to use information they know about is to push our buttons and affect our behavior and beliefs.
They still needed content, but with generative AI that's no longer necessary, this is why social media companies are so invested in it.
Social media is no longer social it became a platform to manipulate people. It is much worse than traditional ways of propaganda, because each person gets their customized feed tuned to issues that are more likely to influence them.
As someone who has grown up watching Card Catalogs lose to electronic search, Internet Directories lose to electronic search, photo albums lose to electronic search, Curated Network Televisions lose out to ellectronic search, large-scale advertising lose out to electronic search...
I don't know. But whatever it is, 20 years from now, we'd say "Why didn't you have a search engine that could do that for you?"
With (general) search engines being on decline for years that looks not all that probable.
No popular search engine even searches what you asked it to search more of what you probably meant if you were as dumb as their ai thinks you are.
Card Catalogs were these index-cards we kept in a cabinet that helped people look for a book. And don't say "word of mouth", because card catalogs didn't help with that. Card Catalogs helped you go from "Author or Subject" to "Book", so you were literally trying to figure out a book you already "had an idea" about.
Tell me, how do you look for new books today? Do you use Amazon's search engine? Google's search engine?
Internet Directories were these lists of webpages that we used to organize. It was before webrings. The gist is that an internet directory is a list of cool websites on a certain subject, and we can keep those lists organized. Alas, no one used them after good search engines were made.
Curated TV Networks are losing out to Netflix, Youtube, and TikTok. All of which are search-engine based media consumption technologies. All hail the algorithm.
Now tell me where "search" is actually losing in our society. Maybe Google isn't as dominant as it once was, but Netflix is still a damn search bar.
Maybe TikTok is finally something different: you don't even search anymore. The algorithm assumes it knows what videos you like and shoves the next video into your face.
I wonder if more people will go back to flip phones. Some of my younger church friends are tired of smartphones and the amount of time and energy they suck out of your life and negative energy social media puts into it, and are switching back to flip phones. It's surprising to see young people using them.
I believe you. History is full of movements and counter-movements. I don't know if it's going to be such a big movement though. Social media is literally addictive. Most people are not strong, mindful or willing enough to kick the habit
It's hard to feed large populations. If not for the current form of the food industry, we wouldn't be able to. It's good for a first draft, now we have to refactor (and we are slowly doing that)
In 20 years we will be shocked that we lived with all of the unnecessary fossil fuel usage while the world was slowly boiling. Oops, we fucked up the biosphere, guess we'll just move to mars and eat fucking solar rays ffs.
What the hell, I misread the OP's title and thought it was about stuff that was common 20 years ago which is no longer normal... I was very confused with everybody else's answers lmao.
Sadly I can't think of an answer for the thread, so downvote/upvote at your will 😂
With the advancement in technology, I'm sure in 20 years augmented reality will really kick off. I'm sure they will wonder why people used to play with controllers and not a VR headset... I might be watching too much SAO and I don't even watch that anime.