Craig Bailey

Bill Gates, speaking to the Royal Academy of Engineers in London last March, managed to capture the problem that Love’s idea would be leveled against: “Our priorities are tilted by marketplace imperatives,” Gates said. “The malaria vaccine, in humanist terms, is the biggest need, but it gets virtually no funding. If you are working on male baldness or the other things you get an order of magnitude more researching funding because of the voice in the marketplace.

Consumers in rich countries don’t need phones anymore, and they’re demanding bigger screens US journalists love to hold phablets up to their heads in order to prove how ridiculous they are as phones, but that misses the point: the fraction of time we spend using these devices for phone conversations continues to shrink. In surveys, time spent on calls comes in fourth after web browsing, social media, music and gaming, and on average may represent as little as 10% of the two hours a day we spend on our “phones.