A penny for your thoughts

I'm sitting here scanning yearbooks and thinking about how technology is going to advance in the next five years, ten years, twenty years. This tedious process of scanning yearbooks probably won't be happening in five years. They'll probably come out with digital copies of them along with the original hard-cover ones. But to think of how scanning is going to work in the future? I bet they'll have machines that you can insert a book, it might rip off the covers, and scan the book, and bind it back together for you after every page is scanned. I wonder how long it would take to develop that technology. How long is it gong to be until paper becomes obselete, if it ever does? That would eliminate so many jobs, such as my dad's in the local paper mill. But what about the environmental payoff? I love to see the development of technology because I believe technology can be cleaner than our traditional methods, like hybrid cars and electric cars, but at what expense do these new norms bring us?