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Comment by deepnet | Hacker News Reader

Where too is the once promised paperless office ?

IMHO the robo jobpocalypse is as overhyped as the paperpocalypse was in the early 1980's

There are a lot less paper than there used to be or could be. But paper is still cheap and of course there are legal reasons for using paper for legal documents/etc.

But ask the people in the printing presses, wood mills, etc how "paper" is doing. Just because it isn't gone doesn't mean that there are headwinds for paper.

People used to say the same thing about pay phones. Cellular phones will never replace pay phones/etc. Look how quickly they disappeared.

But I agree, paper is going to be around for a while, but its usage is in decline.

In some applications paper will hold out for quite some time. Only recently screens with a resolution comparable to paper became practical, and it will take until the 2020s until they are widely deployed outside smartphones. And that screen technology still has problems with reading speed as compared to paper. And in terms of viewing multiple documents next to each other it might take one or two more decades for screens to catch up to paper in everyday use.

Then again in a lot of office applications that is irrelevant, meaning paper is of little use to them.

"widely deployed outside of smartphones" seems an odd qualification. "widely deployed outside of" the most common consumer electronic device in existence, which most people carry on them at all times?

I meant that more in terms of "widely deployed in sizes exceeding the most common paper size (A4/legal)". At the size of a smartphone you have to exceed the resolution of paper by a considerable margin to show the same amount of detail.

As a remote worker, the paperless office is here today (for me). I interact hundreds of times a day with colleagues around the world, and paper is involved perhaps only twice a year (to print plane tickets).

Same here. Not remote, but I've only handled paper forms on very few occassions, mostly when the law requires written form.

In the past 2 years the only things I was given in paper were, contract, insurance form and a ticket train. Now I have tickets on my phone.

Honestly, the fact that so many offices still rely on paper makes me even more concerned about the decline of job availability in the near future.

We already know how to create paperless offices that are successful and reduce labour requirements, and yet so many businesses still aren't taking full advantage of that. That's a lot of lost jobs before we even start considering new technology replacing people.

Were you making a joke perhaps? Paper disappeared from offices.

I agree, paper is absent from many offices, yet very many business still use some paper.

As the amount of businesses and transactions has increased by several orders of magnitude the overall effect is that more paper is being used than ever before.

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