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Mobile phone subscriptions now total 98% of the world’s population. Virtually the entire world’s population (87% of the total population) now has a cellphone.

What’s next?

Personal computers are a mind-expanding device for the world’s first wealthiest one billion people. But they are a very primitive, early adopter device in comparison to the smartphone. A smartphone is a personal computer which is tiny, wireless, and increasingly aware of its environment.

There are over one billion smartphone users now. In a few years, the entire population of cellphone users will be smartphone users. A few years after that, every cell phone will exceed the power of today’s high-end desktop.

In early 2014, we will see high-end smartphones with print-quality screens, 8 cores, and 4GB of memory, and the graphic power of today’s high end video game consoles. By 2016-2018 every cell phone will have the power of a modern desktop.

What happens then?

The speed of innovation for a technology is limited the size of its market. Personal computers have been rapidly growing in adoption, but hit a peak at one billion users. They are not feasible in much of the rest of the world, and soon they will become irrelevant in the developed world. Smartphones have a potential customer base of seven to eight billion users, which means even faster technological progress. Within a decade, personal computers will disappear from common experience, replaced by cloud-backed communication interfaces and sensory nets.

Most pundits assume that the non-elites of the world will standardize on cheap (sub $100) commodity smartphones. I think what is really revolutionary and exciting is that the entire world will standardize on the minimally-functional smartphone necessary to join the human community.

The smartphone used by the world’s other six billion people will offer the minimum functionality needed to participate in the persistent-connection-enabled marketplace. We cannot say now what that functionality will be.

For example, for current smartphones, the “base” functionality means capacitive touch, HTML5 web browser, HD video, 3D graphics, an app store, etc. Future devices will have their own minimum functionality that will serve as a gateway to full membership in society, in the same way that car or credit card ownership does in some parts of the USA. It may be immersive holographic headsets or quasi-AI-capable CPU’s.

Global smartphone adoption will universalize and democratize access to the marketplace in the same way that jeans have universalized and democratized fashion and Coca Cola and hamburgers have democratized diets. But unlike these trends of fashion, opening access to the marketplace is a transformative paradigm shift. It will enable new business models such as digital currency, distance learning, and many that we cannot now imagine.

Unless you are taking photos for legal evidence, or to hand them off for processing to someone else, you are an artist, and should treat your work accordingly. Even if your goal is only to document an event, to take a photo, you must choose the subject, time, and composition of every shot. That means you are choosing the message you wish to convey, regardless of how the viewer may interpret it. Don’t shirk your responsibility as artist by dumping the raw footage onto your viewer. Ruthlessly eliminate and crop the redundant and unessential until only the kernel of the idea you had in your mind when you took the photo remains. Only you know why you found that moment in time and space interesting, so do your best to isolate and communicate that feeling in your work.

And another thing: when you wish to make something memorable, be authentic in your representation of the past. When you want to memorialize an event, don’t pose people and create an artificial situation with big fake grins. Convey real, true emotion with candid shoots. Don’t merely repeat the same pose with different backgrounds — as if to prove that you were there.
On the other hand, don’t always merely observe events: don’t hesitate to get in the action, and make something interesting happen. The fact that you are creating a situation does not make your subject’s reaction to it less authentic.

A good photo has three elements: good composition, nice light, and an interesting subject.

A great photo transcends the present moment. It connects with the viewer emotionally and invites them to tell their own story about the subject.

1: The computer cannot be denser than that which would create a black hole (Bekenstein bound)
2: The temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation sets the minimum operating temperature
3: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Planck’s constant,E = mc2 set a maximum on the energy processing per unit mass (2 x 1047 bits per second per gram of its mass)
4: Due to the second law of thermodynamics, there is a minimum to the energy consumption per computation (Landauer limit)

More: Wikipedia

People tend to become better at doing the thing they are rewarded for doing. Entrepreneurs are good at turning money into products, politicians are good at getting votes, bureaucrats are good at increasing their budgets and influence, and welfare recipients are good at becoming more needy.

In markets with well-defined property rights, there is a tendency for explicit and actual motivations to match.  For example, Apple, BMW, or Wal-Mart want to make stuff I want because they are rewarded to the extent that they make stuff I want.

In politics, the trend is reversed.   Incentives in politics are often the opposite of political promises or goals.

For example, politicians and bureaucrats may honestly want to fix poverty, pollution, corruption, and terrorism, but they are more often rewarded for making all these things worse.

The worse the problem becomes in the voters mind, the larger the politician’s power and scope for action.

The more efficient a democracy, the more it tends to reward those who re-direct resources away from problem-solving activity and toward towards vote-generating activity. In an inefficient or indirect democracy, someone who is a good problem solver can win though the support of a minority that directly rewards success.  In a popular democracy, the ability to get votes will tend to triumph over the ability to achieve campaign promises.

The intentions of politicians and voters are mostly irrelevant – whether they are good or evil, the outcome depends only on what kind of behavior is incentivized. Studies show that most voters are altruistic, not selfish — and this is very destructive. Selfish voters tend to vote based on their own evidence and reward problem solving. Altruistic voters tend to vote based on campaign platforms, have no empirical basis to evaluate a candidate’s proposals, and no incentive to follow up on outcomes.

Although I believe in the individual’s right to own the means to defend himself, I want to say that I do not believe that the reason that there are so many violent shootings in the USA is that too few people own guns. Nor do I believe, that the main problem is that people do not receive enough mental health services. The chief problem is that we are sick to begin with.

The main cause of violence in America is that America has a culture of violence. It is everywhere — in our movies, cities, laws, and homes. It is not the weapons themselves nor any admiration for the weapons that is responsible for our worship of violence, but the fact that almost everyone believes that conflicts of interest are inherent to human interaction. Today, violence and destruction are more deeply seeded in our culture than ever before in the history of America. It is instilled in us when we grow up in violent households, go to violent schools, face violent peers, and experience the politics of violence as adults.

By “violence” I do not refer primarily to crude physical violence, although there is still plenty of that. I refer to the violence done when any parent, schoolyard bully, teacher, policeman, preacher, government bureaucrat, or politician says: “you must do this or else.” I refer specifically to the philosophical worldview implied in that statement: that human values inherently conflict with each other, and therefore men must extract values from each other by force.

The only thing necessary for the violence to end is for people to recognize that there is no conflict of interest between rational men. Everyone, from parents to businessmen to judges must accept the fact that men should and can gain values from each other by voluntary exchange rather than force. We must fully accept, integrate, and apply the simple idea that force is not a moral or practical means to gain the cooperation of other people.

If we raised our children to believe this for the first few years of their life, the violence in our homes, schools, laws and foreign wars would end.