Jan Chipchase: Our cell phones, ourselves
Jan Chipchase has travels the world doing research on how people interact with cell phones.
If you’re in any field that requires technology and human interaction then this is a great video to watch. Jan has some great insights that he shares but better yet he shares his questions about technology and human interaction. It’s the questions that are the most interesting and helpful.
I watched this video right after watching the video by Hod Lipson about Robots that are self-aware. The synthesis of the two central ideas of these two videos is thinking about the world distribution of cell phones as a primordial soup.
The network of cell phones represents an ecosystem where novel solutions pop up to local problems. And as well there is a global organization that permeates through the ecosystem to greater or lesser degrees.
One question that is interesting to me is: what is the nature of the global organization? Because once you start getting a handle on that you can start to see patterns better. As a for instance think about the Internet. There are lots of things that the Internet
P2P became pervasive. Who would have guessed that?
How do cell phone companies make money? Can they continue to do so?
What happens when there are more cellphones than people? That’s when we start to embed cellphones in various devices that we want to be able to communicate. Like earthquake sensors, weather stations, power transformers.
