The World in 2030

The World in 2030 273
the section on robots below). Friction is not knowing which
items in your household are using how much electricity or
gas minute by minute.
In the developing world information technology is also
sucking friction out of daily life at an amazing rate and, in
comparative terms, it has a bigger effect on those underdeveloped
economies than on our own more advanced
economies. Using a cell-phone shared between all residents 492
of a village in Bangladesh, one phone call can save what
would otherwise have been a wasted day’s walk to see a
doctor who has been called away. Another call can save a
half day’s fruitless walk to find that a market did not have
the seeds required.
Fishermen off the coast of Goa 493 can’t afford to buy
marine radios but cheap pay-as-you-go mobile phones now
enable them to communicate when they are out at night
looking for fish. When one boat finds a large school of fish,
all of the other boats can be alerted. When fishing is complete
the phones allow the fishermen to discover which market
along the coast will offer the best price for their catch.
And, as the Economist reported in June 2007 life in
Kenya is being transformed by the mobile phone:
In 2000 some 300,000 people used mobile phones;
now, in a country of 35m-plus, nearly 9m do. As a
result, the lives of millions, especially the poor rural
majority, have been sharply improved, because they
can get round many of the obstacles posed by the
decrepitude of the state-run infrastructure: of the