“ It sounds like science fiction, yet the technology is already there.
Welcome to the Internet of Things (“IOT”). The IOT is a term to describe the technological state where most or even all of the mechanical tools in your day-to-day life are connected to the Internet. It’s been bandied about by futurists and technologists since Kevin Ashton coined the phrase in 1999. Now that the technology has caught up with the prediction, the IOT will mean massive changes to pretty much anything in your life that runs on electricity. Most of this will be good – but not all. There will be tradeoffs. So before assessing the pluses and minuses of a world in which after you tell your smartphone that you’re hungry, it will fire up a Porterhouse on the stove and throw on some Barry Manilow back home, let’s look at where we are in this IOT process. As smartphones have become ubiquitous, we’re now all carrying around Internet connectivity in our pockets. Add to this our obsession with convenience and productivity, and your phone is becoming a mobile command center for every other device in your life. In addition, the processors and sensors needed for dumb devices to become “smart,” have become small and cheap. You can fit them in a car dash, a kitchen appliance, and even a watch. So your phone has the capability to control whatever device is connected to the web – and that now means nearly every device in your home.
It sounds like science fiction, yet the technology is already there.
Amazon’s Alexa can order food for you while it sets the mood music. Google’s Nest lets you control your home temperature from wherever you have a cell signal or Wi-Fi. And nearly every major lock company is getting into the “smart lock” game – so you can access your house or garage if your phone is in your pocket, no key necessary. Machine-to-machine communication is becoming the rule rather than the exception. It’s a question of how quickly we establish the connectivity, and what we decide to do with it. As the IOT continues to roll out, the most obvious benefit will be convenience. You will easily be able to do more with a few swipes on your smartphone than a gaggle of actual human personal assistants could have managed a decade ago. But the real magic isn’t just that these devices will be connected and will easily operate at your direction... They will also be sensitive, as in they will have sensory capability to gather and analyze data. The world around you will become part of a massive – and constantly growing – network of interconnected learning machines, with all the advances in computing power and real- time analysis that will entail.
American Consequences | 95
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