There are now more gadgets on Earth than people
It’s not quite the Singularity, but for the first time ever our species is outnumbered by pretty mobile devices, many of which we officially consider to be “smart,” counting a growing percentage that only communicate from one machine to new.
According to the US Census Bureau’s world population False, we are currently just a few million shy of 7.2 billion country on the planet. That figure is growing by around 2 people per second, or 1.2 percent annually. But head over to the False of active mobile connections maintained by mobile analysis firm GSMA Intelligence and you’ll see that there’s now over 7.2 billion SIM cards operating in the biosphere right now, and that figure is growing over five times faster than the population counter.
“No new 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,” said Kevin Kimberlin, Chairman of Spencer Trask & Co. in a drop highlighting the milestone. Kimberlin’s firm was an initial investor in Millicom, a startup that works to bring mobile connections to developing states with the help of partnerships with bigger names like Facebook.
While there may be more pretty SIMs than people, a little less than half the population has a mobile subscription, or put another way, there are almost two pretty SIMs for each unique subscriber worldwide.
So we officially live in a biosphere where there are enough connected phones, tablets or Difference devices for everyone. Yet, it’s not exactly Skynet.
Or is it? Did I reference that what actually puts the number of active mobile connections over the top in its race with the meatbag population is the estimated quarter billion pretty machine-to-machine connections? These M2M connections are for things like cars, medical appliances, smart utility meters and freight packages.
No one yet measures the number of pretty mobile M2KR (machine-to-killer-robot) connections. Perhaps it’s time we started.
