29 ms·

Until no one actually owns phones and all you have are shared shells that can be picked up anywhere.

• theoh 8y ago
  Unfortunately, as with the idea of batteries for electric cars that can be swapped out at the charging station, there is an incentive to hold onto better units, and quickly return inferior units to the pool. It's a case of Gresham's Law. So the utopia of interchangeable shared units of anything will only be viable if those units are completely indistinguishable. If there's any kind of distribution of quality, the incentives will cause the economy of the system to devolve into hoarding of the better units. One way to work around this is to mandate regular exchange, but that really gets you into the territory of communism. Not necessarily a bad thing in theory or in some vastly different future, but a big change.
  • ozfive 8y ago
    You would have to swap out stock anyway as all physical things degrade with use. It would be a natural culling of devices that would need to be pulled from circulation regardless.This idea doesn't exclude owning your own more powerful device that may have been left at home or a friend's house. You're not interested in the physical object and keeping it for long periods of time. It's a short-term convienince proposition.