I try to be realistic and relative with new ideas I see,
hear or read about, and don’t use labels such as “mind-blowing”, “revolutionary”
or associate ideas to Toffler’s “Future Shock“ too easily. But I've come across one of those concepts,
and I’m staggered by it. The
implications are life-altering on a species-level for humanity, and I’m stunned
by it’s significance.
I recently wrote about the mountain of data we were on the
verge of collecting, and ironically, I think I missed a rather key point. The real-time reality capture we’re on verge
of making happen is but one of the mega-data components we’re enabling today. The other is the object data, connectivity,
rules and implicit implications surrounding the internet of things. For those uninitiated, the internet of things
is the connected-ness of inanimate objects and networking them. At a macro-level, imagine your refrigerator
connected to the web and telling you to pick up some eggs on the way home from
home via SMS when you’re low on them.
Clever, yes ? At a more detailed level, it’s the labelling of each
individual egg with unique identifiers that exist from production through
distribution and consumption and these guide the need to create it, how to care
for it, the distribution and marketing of it, the pricing of it and finally its’
consumption and recycling. A smart egg
indeed. Every single item, in every
household and every business, everywhere, in real time all connected and
interacting. Starting to see the scale ?
Complement that with real time capture
of every stage in every day of both human and automated process reality.
Like any system, efficiency is achieved through scale. With a rudimentary backbone already in place
to connect (the internet) early systems, the framework for this infrastructure
exists today. The check-out is connected
to the warehouse now, so demand, shipping and re-supply are all automated
already. Getting more granular is straightforward.
Go forward now. The implications for us are
overwhelming. For this to happen we will
need to revolutionize how we look at a number of aspects of our lives as we
know them.
· * We will require whole new identification systems
as today’s are cursory and simplistic when the interactive and pervasive nature
of the future is considered. Bar codes, RFID and IPV6 don’t cut it. Will we need to be tagged too ?
· * The economics of this world will need to change
as production is empowered with smart supply and smart demand. More pointedly, the economics will need to
systemically embedded so that ‘things’ understand their intrinsic systemic value. The “Blade Runner” future vision of being
hammered 24/7 with advertising we’ve been weaned on misses the point that as we’re
too feeble in our attention spans to manually manage ourselves in this world,
and will have to hand over ‘economic rules’ to the system itself. Who defines
these ?
· * The rules or law itself will need to morph from
what’s happened, which typifies our current legal approach to the web, to being
enforcement of design rules.
Over-production, or faulty production (Sorry we accidentally killed your
husband, the factory had a glitch) will cease to be human-caused, and so our
liability concepts will evolve to allow statistically acceptable levels of
error.
· * We will live always-connected, a cog in the
wheel in a system we don’t actually run any longer, but enabled. ‘Opt-outs’ will be a lifestyle choice I might
imagine until it’s clearly uneconomic for the system, so will be eliminated.
· * Power in the form of politics and nations will
have to evolve as protection of systems rises in importance equal to people.
· * Power in the form of electrical generation will
also develop, as today’s data storage and management already takes the energy of 30 nuclear plants.
I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that by and large, we
don’t see this coming.
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