I'm not being figurative when I say that the credit and debit cards we carry around in our wallets are dead dinosaurs (and, actually, so is cash...at least, here in New Zealand). They are literally dead dinosaurs.
How so? Well, they are all made from plastic. Plastic mostly comes from crude oil. Crude oil is a fossil fuel, which is literally a fuel we have made from the fossilised remains of, amongst other things, dinosaurs.
QED.
That's not to say that they're not useful. As with most products of fossil fuel, it is hard to imagine a modern world without them, given the impact (both positive and negative) they have on modern life. However, as also with most products of fossil fuel, there is quite the surge in recent thinking about how we can move away from this kind of tech, and the thinkers seem to fit into two camps: extend/economise and replace/revolutionise.
The first group are those who see the immediate future being about extending the existing capabilities of credit/debit cards by accessorising with other technology (think Near Field Communications [NFC] tech) or by consolidating and combining the features of previously disparate cards to reduce the number you need to carry (e.g. credit and debit on the same card, plus foreign exchange). The analogue in automotives would be hybrid technology (i.e. adding an electric motor, but you still have a petrol one at the core) and fuel consumption technology (i.e. squeezing every possible centimetre of distance from each litre of fuel) - both of which focus on reducing, but not removing, the need to use petrol.
This is a valuable, laudable and important group...but it doesn't solve the problem of dependence.
The second group, however, is looking a little more ahead to a time when the cards won't be required at all. Some early thought in this area led to online purchasing and 'Card Not Present' (CNP) transactions - where by just knowing the card number and expiry, you were able to make purchases. The future, however, is epitomised by thinking like that of Square - not with their magstripe reader attachment to smartphones, but rather with their recently rebranded Pay With Square .
If you check out the video, you'll note that there is no card being produced, no number being remembered - just an app, a vendor and a customer. I love the simplicity of this, and the fact that you could see this extend to the point where physical credit cards could be removed from the transaction equation in favour of a cleaner, simpler app form.
Now we just need to start working on removing plastics from the manufacture of smartphones. :)