The World Keeps Speeding Ahead

​I stood behind her as she ordered her orange chicken. The nice lady behind the counter said, "that will be $17.15."

The woman pulled a wallet out of her purse, fumbled with some bills inside it, then handed them over. She told the lady behind the counter to hold on a minute, that she would find the change.

The woman dug through who knows what to get to the bottom of her purse, seemingly in no hurry, and eventually pulled out several coins. She placed them on the counter. The lady behind the counter looked confused as she picked up the change, but then looked up to the woman and kindly said, "I'm sorry, it's 50 cents - five zero - not 15."

The woman apologized and went once again to digging. It was a purse seemingly with no bottom. She eventually found the other 35 cents and placed them on the counter.

Thank you, the lady behind the counter told her.

I stepped forward. Ordered my shrimp and broccoli (and egg roll and wonton soup 🤷‍♂️). That will be $22.35, the lady behind the counter told me. I tapped my debit card against the card reader.

Thank you, she said.

In a bit or irony, I had purposely left my phone at home. We needed a little separation, my phone and I. So I sat quietly in a booth while I waited on my to go order.

I thought about what had just happened there - the past meets the present. I thought about how the only way I knew how to pay for things as a child was now in many ways an outdated way of paying for anything at all. As a child I used to celebrate the chance to hold a pile of dollar bills in my hand; now I struggle to remember the last time I held one at all.

I thought, forty years from now tapping a card against a card reader will be outdated. It will become the new way of slowing lines down. I wondered, what on earth will that look like.

I came home and asked ChatGPT about it - the official voice of the intelligence that is literally mapping this all out for us.

ChatGPT told me:

In forty years, tapping a debit card will be as dated as handing over a wrinkled dollar bill.

Maybe we won’t carry wallets at all—just a chip beneath the skin, a blink, a nod, a fingerprint scanned invisibly in motion. The transaction will be seamless—no button to press, no pause. You'll step out of the restaurant and your lunch will already be paid for.

And someone behind you—maybe younger, maybe not—will look at you strangely if you hesitate, nostalgic for the "old" days when you tapped a card or at least got a thank-you from a human being. Because in forty years, maybe there’s no one behind the counter. Just an AI interface and a robotic arm handing over your orange chicken.

When I was a child, we would fret over the possible means of human demise. What would make us, like the dinosaurs before us, extinct?

Nuclear wars?

Global pandemics?

Alien invasions?

Fireballs and mushroom clouds.....

Will there come a day when I will be standing in line, watching a robotic arm handing the woman in front of me orange chicken, while I look around and wonder - where did all the people go?

It's hard to imagine, for sure.

But then again, 40 years ago I would have had a hard time imagining the extinction of dollar bills