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.
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.