The century of garbage

One small smart phone replaces dozens of kilograms of cassettes. The same phone - which is sometimes upgraded to an iPad - also replaces several hundred kilograms (at least in my case) of books and there are many other examples 

I was recently invited to come to Australia in the coming months and share with the audience there some of my thoughts on the 21st century. In other words, to pretend that I am Yuval Noah-Harari. After I agreed, I realized that I should really compile some thoughts about the 21st century. And after I compiled, I decided it wouldn't hurt to put some of them in writing.

The first thought came when I saw Yanai, my two and a half year old son, playing in his kindergarten with a toy that cost almost a thousand dollars. This is not a special or high-quality kindergarten. Just the opposite: the kindergarteners brought devices from their homes so that the children could play with them. One of those devices, which if it hadn't made it to the kindergarten would have been thrown in the garbage, was a cordless phone about 15 years old: an open clamshell phone that at the beginning of the twenty-first century sold for many hundreds of dollars and was considered the luxury of technology.

I want to emphasize: a product that 15 years ago was considered the most advanced on the market, has today become waste - an item that we are trying to get rid of because we have nothing more to do with it. It is so obsolete and unnecessary that we don't even try to sell it to others or recover its value. Just - get rid of it and throw it away so it doesn't take up unnecessary space. Its main use is to amuse children as if it were a toy, and even they are not entirely sure what to do with it - as you can tell from this picture, where my innocent child thinks that the antenna should go into his ear for the phone to work.
And this little story is the background to the first thought: the 21st century is going to be a century of garbage. Or rather, a century of garbage.

Why, in fact?

From the moment the Internet became a global phenomenon woven into our lives everywhere and at all times, we are witnessing a transition from an "ownership" model to a "rental" or "subscription" model. If in the past every person had a collection of music records, cassettes or CDs at home, today people only need a subscription to Amazon Prime, or Spotify, or any other platform that allows them to hear the tunes they want. They can even use YouTube completely for free. All they need for this is one small smartphone, which replaces tens of kilograms of cassettes. The same phone - which is sometimes upgraded to an iPad - also replaces several hundred kilograms (at least in my case) of books. I use it to read any book I want, anywhere.
What happens to all those books, CDs and other data storage products that are no longer needed? Depends on the emotional value they have. Most of us can throw away old cassettes or CDs after transferring their contents to a computer. Books still have an emotional value for us, and they provide us with the acetella of supreme cultural figures when friends come to visit us and see the shelves full of books. So we usually keep the books until the day we die. But it's pretty clear that most of the other products we use don't have the same aura of luxury as our paper books. We will be happy to get rid of most of them as soon as a suitable alternative is found for them. They will become part of the garbage that will characterize the 21st century.
What will be found, then, in the garbage heaps of the 21st century, in thirty or fifty years? Here are some educated guesses.

Keys to the future

First of all, there are products that can be easily replaced using the new technologies. Artificial intelligence, for example, makes it possible to exchange keys. A key is to verify your identity: if you have a key, you belong to the group of people who are allowed to open the door. But a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence can take a look at you, verify your identity, and automatically open the door for you. There are approximately 15 billion doors of houses and cars in the world [1] [2]. Let's assume that each of these has two keys on average, and we will accept that in the coming decades approximately 30 million kilograms of keys are going to be thrown into the garbage[3].
Devices that rely on a USB connection

What more? Here's another product that's in the trash heaps of the future: disk-on-key. It has become so cheap that it is given out for free at many conferences, but inventions like Dropbox and Google Drive - and the cloud in general - make it almost completely redundant. But you don't have to stop here. The meaning of the increasing connectivity between all devices is that a large part of the cables in our homes - and especially those that do not connect devices to electricity, but are intended to help transfer information between different devices - will also find their way to the trash can in the coming decades. This trend will become even stronger if we manage to develop effective means for wireless charging.
How much trash is this? There are currently more than ten billion cables and devices today that connect to the computer and electricity via a USB plug, and every year three billion additional such devices are produced[4]. Since they are very different from each other, I'm not going to try to estimate how much they all weigh together, but I think we can agree that it's a lot of junk.

The cars and the walls

The last two items on the list probably won't be found in the typical pile of trash on the street. The first is the family car. Already today, young people are not enthusiastic about car ownership, and it's hard to blame them. Owning a car requires obtaining a driver's license, passing tests, regular and expensive care and maintenance, refueling every few days, compulsory and third-party insurance, arranging parking on the street and... yes, purchasing the car itself. Replace all of these with autonomous taxis that cost pennies per trip - and you will understand why the private vehicle may find itself in the dustbin of history in the coming decades. Not all the vehicles will disappear, of course, but even if half of the vehicles find themselves out of use, this is already close to a billion vehicles that will have to find a new home in the scrap yards.
The second and strangest item may be the walls inside the houses. I admit I'm running wild with the imagination here, but, well, we're talking about a future eighty years away. So many things will change by then. Is it really so crazy to think that in a world where every person receives virtual reality broadcasts directly to their eyes, and voices directly to their ears, we can be satisfied with virtual walls that will divide between offices and between rooms? And what about those who do not respect these walls? He will be discovered immediately by artificial intelligences that look into every room, and if we go one step further - they may also be able to direct a beam of light directly into his eyes to blind him so that he does not see what is happening in the other room.
Yeah, that's probably really crazy. But who knows - maybe such a return will really happen, and suddenly we will discover that tens of billions of tons of concrete, glass, ceramics and other building materials are no longer required. I'm not saying this is what will happen, but only that this is what could happen.
And one more thing I say: whoever prepares for these changes may profit in a big way.

profit from the garbage

History is full of moments when certain products become garbage. In his book "A World Without Work", Daniel Suskind writes that at the end of the 19th century, horses still crowded the streets of the world's largest cities. Twenty years later, all buses in New York - which used to be horse-drawn - became motorized. The horses have become garbage - and I have a feeling that those who recognized this trend and invested in the services to remove the horses to farms where they could grow old with dignity, found themselves a serious source of income. And yes, I know what they do to horses whose time has passed, but let me be a romantic.

To sum up the thought about the 21st century: Do you want to find a good source of income? This is the garbage of the future, and start preparing for it. Keys are recycled all the time, and that's nothing new, but you can certainly find creative uses for the billions of unnecessary meters of plastic and copper cables, the billion-plus of private cars, and the billions of tons of building materials. At the very least, it would be possible to make good money collecting all these items, recycling them and reselling them.
Successfully!

To Dr.Roey Tsezana's blog post
[1] Can anyone estimate the number of doors in the world?
[2] How many cars are there in the world?
[3] Estimating a weight of ten grams for an average key
[4] Three billion USB devices are manufactured every year

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• Clean and efficient recycling of electronic waste
• Lack of efforts to treat waste
• Expensive garbage
• The environmental price of the smart phone and computing industry