The consumers of 2050 will look back at the early years of the millennium and marvel at the amount of time people wasted sourcing daily essentials and accumulating things they used infrequently.
The drudgery of pushing a trolley and two children around a packed supermarket on a Saturday morning and loading a dozen bags of groceries into a car will appear comically inefficient, rather like doing laundry by hand and putting it through a mangle.
“The things we need will just come to us without us thinking too much about it,” says Sophie Hackford, a UK-based futurist, as internet-connected devices “l(fā)earn” when (and when not) to order replacement items.