> so we might indeed be headed for a future where governments keep giant databases of biometric information

Don't want to wake you from that nice dream but that ship has sailed quite a while back, at least here in the EU.

Biometrics are usernames at best not passwords.

We are already in that future and have been for at least a decade. Passports contain biometrics which are in a central db too.

What? What to replace the phones with? And why whatever replaces them wouldn't be able to do the same things?