jims musings

Did you know the future gets closer– every day!
By the end of 2009, around 4.6 bil­lion cell phones were in use– nearly 70% of the world pop­u­la­tion, and nearly the entire adult pop­u­la­tion. This is an amaz­ing sta­tis­tic! In prod­uct terms, cell phones rival food. Only oxy­gen and sun­light have a solid lead on cell phone use.
Cur­rently, most of these phones are pretty basic– phone calls only. This will change rapidly. Soon, more than half of cell phones will be internet-capable. They will have cam­eras, GPS receivers and all sorts of doo­dads. They will also be pro­gram­ma­ble, with thou­sands of down­load­able appli­ca­tions. These appli­ca­tions are the key to suc­cess of these bil­lions of mobile devices. They will cater to the myr­iad needs of mankind– whether it is help­ing a New Yorker find a great new place for lunch or a Niger­ian dry farmer plan his crop and coor­di­nate a plant­ing sched­ule with nearby farm­ers.
In terms of ‘sur­vival of the fittest’, these devices help make us ‘fit­ter’. Com­bin­ing sub­stan­tial com­pu­ta­tional power, inter­net access and the need of the moment, these devices allow us to respond more pow­er­fully to our momen­tary needs.
I fore­see not only GPS and cam­era ubiq­uity in these phones, but also barom­e­ters, ther­mome­ters, incli­nome­ters, and mag­ne­tome­ters. Pos­si­bly some sort of laser or sonar-based mea­sure­ment capa­bil­ity as well. Also, there will be built-in net­work­ing of sub­stan­tial sophis­ti­ca­tion. Phones will be able to ‘talk’ with one another, shar­ing user data, posi­tion infor­ma­tion and per­haps even using shared sig­nals. In many places, you will be able to use your phone like a remote con­trol– order­ing a soda from a vend­ing machine just by point­ing and click­ing (there’ll be an app for that). Also, data col­lected by these devices (baro­met­ric pres­sure, for exam­ple) will be sharable with the NOAA or other trusted orga­ni­za­tions.
There will be inter­est­ing social effects. Par­ents will be thought odd if their chil­dren do not have a cell phone. “How do you know if they’re okay?” will be the ques­tion. Gov­ern­ments every­where will seek the abil­ity to push and pull data from these devices. Emer­gency broad­casts and even ‘a direct line to the peo­ple’ will be the rea­son­ing. We may even see true democracy-style remote vot­ing tried in smaller pop­u­la­tions.
Get set, these phones are gonna be every­where.