I have an idea for a really cool service that I don’t see myself developing anytime soon. Though if there are some funders and mobile hackers who want to collaborate I would be willing to go for it.

The iPhone and recent Qik streams that I saw, gave me this idea:

Create a distress application on the iPhone. Tapping it shows you a Yes/No button to indicate whether you are really in distress. A distress call sends a live video stream from your iPhone, a cellular phone connection and your best guess location as received from Google Maps to a party who can aid you.

These parties can be one of two:

Social: Other users who use the service and who are nearby are alerted and they are expected to at least make the effort to move towards you and keep tabs of what’s happening. Heroic measures are not required but if somebody who’s feeling threatened is no longer alone their threat level usually also decreases.
This would imply a high level of social coherence and necessitate a way to penalize people ignoring distress calls. But I think the willingness to ‘make society work’ is present and seeing an old lady afraid of being mugged would prompt most people to at least walk over and check if she’s ok.

Premium: This is where you can make the money. The easiest case would be to connect the person to a 911 (or 112) central and have law enforcement officials assess the threat and take action. This works for the base case and in societies which have a functioning rule of law.
People who want extra protection or who don’t want to depend on official police could contract a SLA which depending on the amount of money paid could dispatch private security enforcers to your location by car or by helicopter (from $2000/month up or so).
I think there are enough people with enough fear that this could be a viable business model.

The problem with the premium model is that it opens up avenues towards a freelance police state (of the Blackwater type). For me and I think for the coherence of society in general, this makes the social model more desirable.

Direct communication and location information is going to have large effects on how society works and is organized but I think that has been obvious for some time now.

Determinism

And they pretty much taught us in our technical university that that technological determinism was not the way to go. There was some discussion but not nearly enough. In ethics classes I think the American approach of giving all the arguments and have students debate it out is far better, than the soft socialist Dutch approach of implying a One True Way (you’ll won’t usually find a convincing pro-Death penalty argument in course readers).

I’m not saying technology is the end all. But implementations carry with them their own values which are difficult to work around to say the least and technology which makes difficult or impossible things convenient, radically changes societies and is completely unquestioned by new generations. We have seen this and we’re going to see more of it in the future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 13:09 and is filed under iphone, mobile, social.