“No other technology has impacted us like the mobile phone. It’s the fastest growing manmade phenomenon ever — from zero to 7.2 billion in three decades”
Kevin Kimberlin, Chairman of Spencer Trask & Co, speaking on the recently reached milestone of there being more active mobile phones than there are humans on Planet Earth
Yes folks it has happened already; there are more Internet connected Gadgets than Humans as pointed out in my article The Internet of Things – Our AI’s State of Connectedness. This fact is worth repeating, but this time using new sources of data for Mobile Phones, which have now BY themselves eclipsed the human population. Or do they control us already, with their bright LCD LED screens, Game Apps and constant Social Media updates?
There are now more mobile phones than people on Earth according to Kevin Kimberlin, Chairman of Spencer Trask & Co who noticed this milestone. We’re slowly drowning in a pool of smart gadgets of our own making. This is obvious when you compare the rather entrancing US Census Bureau World Population Counter, which says we’re at 7.1 billion people on Earth against the equally entrancing GSMA Intelligence Counter that declares that there are 7.2 million Gadgets on Earth, mostly feature phones.
Mobile phones outnumber humans – Skynet is coming powered by M2M and we already like Apple Pay
Human, we’re losing the race against these machines.
Combine this with M2M (Machine to Machine) communications in the form of Internet connected Cars, Appliances and now Apple iPhone with Apple Pay as mentioned in Apple iPhone 6 and Plus with 128GB Storage and Apple Pay is Biggest iPhone Launch and you start to realize as much as they’re “power” is growing, we can’t live without our Gadgets doing some of the work for us by talking among themselves.
Smartphones are scary enough; imagine all those Bot programs that account for 61% of the traffic on the Internet as I’d pointed out in 61% of all Traffic on the Internet is generated by bots. So imagine if all those 7.2 billion gadgets were all internet connected? Those bot program would have physical bodies to inhabit. Combined with AI, Skynet a la Terminator isn’t a far-fetched possibility!
Silliness aside, Apple pay is definitely going to be the catalyst for increased used of M2M for Mobile Transactions. That’ll boost the population of the Internet-Connected devices, especially smartphones. Hoping the next milestone is total number of Robots vs the human population, as these “smart” devices are really much of a treat after all!
Still, I’ve got my EMP (ElectroMagnetic Pulse) armed and ready, should my smartphone decide that I am not worth waking up to in the morning!
US Census Bureau World Population Counter