Doesn't anyone else feel like hummanity (consumers) should be focusing more on things like healthcare technology, clean energy technology and space exploration...
The consumer demand for these is causing the hardware to become commoditized, and thus standardized and cheaper. That has huge benefits for the other fields you mention, since the hardware is cheaper, more familiar to decision-makers, and has a larger base of potential developers, testers, and collaborators. For example, here's a story from a couple months ago about NASA experimenting with Android phones for computing duties in mini-satellites: http://gigaom.com/mobile/google-in-space-nasa-powers-mini-sa...
What if the demand for smartphones wasn't as strong over the last few years and thus the technology didn't grow as fast... instead the demand for electric vehicles was as strong as it has been for new smartphones over the past few years and thus the technology had grown faster?