While volunteering at a local school media center, I had occasion to handle several older-style computer mice, the sort that used a rubber ball instead of the modern low-power laser. As I reminisced about cleaning the troublesome mechanical mice, it occurred to me that our son will never use a mouse with a ball in it. It's doubtful he'll even use a mouse with a cord on it, and with the touchpads on laptops today having the ability to read multi-finger gestures, it's possible he will never buy a mouse of his own, but merely look at them as those quaint little devices that his parent's computers had. My overactive imagination quickly started assembling a comprehensive list of all the technology that Gavin will look back on as "old-fashioned", and all the new and exciting technology arriving daily that he will take for granted.

With access to the internet fast becoming ubiquitous, increasing amounts of information are passing through it. The internet will be the conduit for most of the information that Gavin receives throughout his life, though none of his internet experiences will ever be prefixed with the raucous screeching of two modems negotiating a connection. With a constant connection to everyone and everything, most any question that strikes him need only be pondered for as long as takes to get to the Google search page. He may have a job that he conducts solely in the ether, like his mother. Also like his mother, he may use the internet to connect to his coworkers, never having to drive to work. Police departments of his day will be enlarging their computer-crime departments, tracking down criminals who conduct their nefarious activities without a daily commute.

Gavin may never use a land-line phone. He will have a mobile smartphone, like the iPhone or the Blackberry, but there is talk now of renaming those types of devices "coms" to better reflect the plethora of communication types and computational abilities they provide. Hopefully, sometime in the not-too-distant future, mobile phone companies and their 2-year contracts will cease to exist, replaced by a market full of competitively-priced "Mobile Internet Service Providers". Access to the internet will become a simple utility like water or power, and once service is setup, consumers will be free to use the device of their choosing to access it. Gavin's iPhone (like current iPhones) will make phone calls, send email (he may never write a letter), check the weather (he won't want to wait for the local weather to come around on the TV), catch up the news (both "mainstream news outlets" and blogs), search for local businesses, get maps, satellite imagery, StreetView, or turn-by-turn directions from his current location, check up on social networks, and download movies and TV episodes. His iPhone will also allow him to play video games and listen to his music as well as podcasts (the modern equivalent of talk radio) and audiobooks.

With music and podcasts available for instant download, he may never buy a radio. With both Dirty Jobs and Mythbusters available online (as well as many other, lesser shows), he may never own a television. It is most likely he'll have a large display in his living room that connects solely to his computer for content. When in the mood for a good mystery, he will certainly read conventional books, but will eventually own a connected ebook reader like the Amazon Kindle. If he finds himself on vacation without the next Harry Potter book, he need only whip out his ebook reader and download it from the internet.

While on vacation, he may desire to know more about the scenery around him. There are now several applications for smartphones that use the camera, GPS, and accelerometer of the smartphone to overlay information onto what you look at through the phone's camera, referred to as "augmented reality". Gavin will be able to aim the camera of his iPhone at the skyline of a strange city, and the screen of the iPhone will show the camera's live video feed, but with all the buildings and other objects labeled, including links to corresponding websites or Wikipedia entries.

Only while camping in the wilderness will Gavin be unable to access the internet, and maybe not even then. Before leaving for the woods, he will have read reviews of the trails online, downloaded maps and satellite imagery, and programed all the important trailheads and campsites into his GPS. He will purchase paper topographical maps as backups for the backcountry, but he will live in a world where paper road maps are extinct. GPS navigators are on the road right now that specify everything down to what lane to be in for the upcoming turn, and road testing is being conducted for consumer GPS devices that report back to the "cloud" with vehicle speed and location information, so they are all instantaneously sharing traffic information.

Having had his father foster an exciting robotics hobby (even his toys will be smarter than ours), Gavin will certainly own a robotic vacuum cleaner, and may never push a traditional vacuum around his house. He will almost certainly hack said robotic vacuum to do his bidding, including but not limited to chasing the cats and fetching things from the fridge. Should he join the armed services, he will still have to go to boot camp, but may do most of his soldiering via computer, remotely controlling unmanned aerial vehicles, bomb disposal robots, or unmanned supply convoys. He could be tasked with deploying packs of autonomous robots into battle against enemy robots. He may join a new breed of battlefield surgeons, instantly telecommuting between many different field hospitals on the front lines, saving lives by remotely controlling a robotic surgeon and virtually sending his skills places to which he cannot physically travel fast enough.

No life is without a few hardships, but Gavin need never feel alone. He will be just a quick web search away from finding a group of people suffering the same hardship, gathered together to provide each other support. If his hardships come in the form of medical problems, now-burgeoning genetics research will have changed many medical diagnosis and treatment questions from "could we?" to "should we?". He will have a medical chart, but it will be stored (hopefully securely) in the "cloud", and he will be able to view and edit parts of it himself. Some patients with severe allergies or other complex issues are already getting RFID implants to allow doctors to scan their (possibly unconscious) bodies and thus retrieve important treatment information.

Gavin will never expose a single frame of conventional film. All of his photographs will be taken digitally, and instantly reviewed. He will never go to the drugstore to "see how his photos turned out". The photographs he wishes to share with distant friends and relatives will be waiting for them online within hours of the photo being taken. He will never mail a batch of photos, nor will he carry wallet-sized photos of his children, as all the latest photos and videos of his kids will travel with him everywhere on the flash drive in his iPhone.

Gavin will document this technologically interesting life of his on the modern day diary: the blog. He and his friends will have a hard time imagining what life was like before the internet. He will have friends that he communicates with mostly or wholly online, vaguely like the pen-pals of old. These online relationships will be much deeper than those with old-fashioned pen-pals, though, as the myriad of social networking tools on the web today allow distant friends to share not only pictures, movies, and games, but what they had for lunch or what they think of the person sitting next to them on the subway. When Gavin wants a recipe for oysters or would like to know a good restaurant in town, he will not be "limited" to the huge amount of such information already published online, he is only a Twitter post away from asking everybody he knows how they cook oysters or where they go for a really good steak dinner. The small tidbits of everyday life that get passed through Twitter and the "doing now..." field on Facebook are the details that allow friends to feel strongly connected with each other. Friends tell each other when they go out and where, what they had fun doing that day, and many other small things that are important to a relationship, but not profound enough to be included in a letter or email. Spending virtual time together will not be the same as spending time together in person, but virtual time may still become more prevalent than face-to-face time. Society will follow changes in the economy, and the economy will follow changes in technology.

Perhaps I'm just stating the obvious. I'm not predicting anything new here, just listing all the things I have seen while reading the gadget blogs daily. I have only mentioned technology that is already available, and if not ubiquitous, simply waiting for improvements in existing technology (mainly batteries) to become ubiquitous. Anyway, while this list of "nevers" is interesting in and of itself, I've said all of the above to just to say the following: what truly amazes me are not all the newfangled gadgets arriving now that will make Gavin's life amazingly different than ours, but all the things that will come around in another 30-40 years and make Gavin's gadgets seem quaint and old-fashioned. What will Gavin and his peers invent that will make the iPhone seem like a rotary phone?