Technologies I thought my son would never use
Taleb talks about the Lindy effect and some of the surprises in this article can be explained it.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effectThe rough heuristic is: the longer a technology has been around, the longer it will last into the future.That is, it's NOT the case that every piece of technology lasts roughly the same amount of time, and then is replaced.For example, a chair vs. an iPhone.  Which one will be used further into the future?  Almost certainly a chair.----Land lines have been around a lot longer than fax machines (both in the article), so they will likely outlive fax machines.Will HTML or JavaScript last longer?  Probably HTML, since it came first.What about ASCII or HTML?  Probably ASCII.These have a "dependency stack" issue, but it applies regardless.  And I think that is part of the phenomenon -- low level technologies that are widely adopted take longer to go away.  Plumbing, electrical (AC vs DC), land lines, TCP/IP, BIOS, etc.I can't find a link now, but there was a recent Kevin Kelly article about finding farming tools from a catalog in the 1800's still in use.   I think he said that almost EVERY one was still in use, or able to be purchased, which is a nice illustration of the point.  It takes a long time for old tech to die, and arguably it never does.