There's nothing innate to the iPhone itself which provides for basic needs: water, food, shelter, clothing. It can play a role in the procurement or execution of task, but does not of itself provide them.... Pulling Maslow's hierarchy into this really hammers home the disconnect: poverty is defined by access to the necessities of life.
Generally phones are communication. Historically people deprived of communication (relatively speaking) had economical trouble and not just because they couldn't afford it.
It opens opportunities.
iPhone might be a toy, but an old PC with web and email and an old phone with voice and SMS are much needed these days. Heck, there are very cheap and usable smartphones out there.
Density and latency are important though to a point. If you cannot download video due to bad ISP, you won't have access to certain educational opportunities. If your connection is accessible only once a week, you might miss something as simple and critical as accurate weather predictions.
I think next step would be integrating the communication device with body either via haptics or implants, to even further open bandwidth and reduce latency.
Obviously you cannot directly escape poverty with just information. But you can network locally, which can be even better solution. Networking, especially longer range, has a way of making big problems solvable.
"Opens opportunities" != "substitutes for necessities".
The usual form of the fallacy, and the one made by @lotsofpulp here, is that the capabilities of infotech toys are intrinsically valuable and sufficient.
Most of everything is optimization indeed on top of our basic human capabilities, thus not strictly necessary.
But there is intrinsic value in fast long range audiovisual communication itself. The easier they are to use and more available, the higher this value, because now people can use them.
It's exactly as if you're arguing that advanced farming tools have no intrinsic value. But without them starvation is the only outcome.
The value of them is conditional, but not extrinsic.
Mind you, communication is not as critical. We have instant local communication built in, speech and body language. And it is very easy to write or paint. Harder to distribute it for sure.
Transportation is communication too, just higher latency but much more useful. We have that built in as well, it's walking, and can go quite some range of hundreds of kilometers. It's just slow and low carrying weight.
Whether modern comms allow us to do something useful and otherwise impossible remains to be seen. Transport and farming already have done it.
You definitely cannot access resources you don't know about - and that is the value of communication. It also optimizes trade, travel and work including worker allocation. On its own, it does not solve any problem but makes big problems more tractable. Organising on bigger than village scale with any semblance of speed.
There are problems you cannot even begin to attack on local scale.
Even in ancient days, hunters communicated where to hunt for best results. Farmers taught methods that worked.
And then there's the basic social need of belonging. Though our impersonal modes of phone and net do not exactly work, they make face to face easier to set up.
On the other hand, whether low latency broadcast communication is needed remains to be seen, or what it affords us if anything.
Usually mail, press/radio is good enough, cheap too. Books for more in depth learning. Phone is good enough for emergencies, including text. Video is situationally useful.
The main gain here is that you can access the needed information on demand rather than wait for it to become available and potentially miss out.
Computing power is a different matter entirely, you can solve optimization problems if you want, guess weather, predict climate, population and economy. That is somewhat difficult but not impossible to run on a smartphone reasonably. But you can always use a phone as a thin client to access such data.
> iPhones are lovely, but they are pretty small in the grand scheme of what is needed for physical comfort.
So I wasn’t writing anything about Maslow, nor do I know anything about Maslow. To me, physical comfort is not just the next meal or sleep. Of course those are important, but to minimize the impact of a device that can email, apply to jobs, pay bills, talk to people, fill out immigration forms, etc is nonsensical.
After you have your next meal and next night’s sleeping quarter sorted out, you need to worry about the following night and the one thereafter. So for tasks like getting a job, networking, educating oneself, it’s a very powerful tool, and has changed the world.
The broader point is that though a phone is a means to survival needs (air, water, food, clothing, shelter), it is not a substitute for them. "The ability to securely communicate with anyone around the world instantaneously, take pictures and video, and access almost all information online is pretty valuable" does little if you're thirsty, starving, naked, and exposed.
Unless you can call someone who brings you food, clothing and book a living space. Oh and have a chat.
(Of course very little is free.)
It does not satisfy needs directly, but it is first order interacting with them.
Now, without means you cannot satisfy anything. Food is means too, as is house, these are directly satisfying a need. Communication can only maybe directly satisfy the high level needs. (Belonging and up.)
There's nothing innate to the iPhone itself which provides for basic needs: water, food, shelter, clothing. It can play a role in the procurement or execution of task, but does not of itself provide them.... Pulling Maslow's hierarchy into this really hammers home the disconnect: poverty is defined by access to the necessities of life.
Toys by definition are not necessities.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vwfb6/maslows...