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Browsing Tags technology

IoT (Internet of Things): A Short Series of Observations [pt 6]: The Disruptive Power of IoT

May 19, 2016 · by parasam

Tsunamis, Volcanoes, Cellphones and Wireless Broadband – Disruptive Elements

Natural disruptions change the environment, and although a new equilibrium is achieved nothing is quite the same. In recent history, the advent of the cellphone changed most of humanity, allowing a level of communication and cohesion that was never before possible. Following on that is the ever-increasing availability of sufficient wireless bandwidth to enable powerful distributed computing. We must not lose sight of the fact that with smartphones, we all walk around now with mobile computers that happen to also make phone calls… And for comparison, an Apple iPhone6 is 120 million times more capable (in terms of total memory and cpu clock speed) than the computers that send man to the moon less than 50 years ago.

disruption03

The long-term disruptive effect of IoT in the next decade will eclipse any other technological revolution in history. Period. To be more precise, the combination of technologies that will encompass IoT will form the juggernaut that will propel this massive disruption. These include IoT itself (the devices and directly interconnecting network fabric), AI (Artificial Intelligence), VR/AR (Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality) and DCT (Distributed Cloud Technology). Each of these technologies are rapidly maturing on their own, but are more or less interdependent, and will collectively construct a layer of intelligence, awareness and responsiveness that will forever change how humans interact with the physical world and each other.

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The number of electronic devices that are all interconnected is expected to outnumber the total population of the planet within a year, and to exceed the number of people by over 10:1 within 7 years. In mysticism and philosophy we used to think the term Akashic Records (the complete record of all human thought and emotion, recorded on an astral plane of some sort) was science fiction or the result of the ingestion of controlled substances… now we know this as Google… With virtually every moment of our lives recorded on Instagram, Facebook, etc. and the capacity of both storage and processing making possible the search and derivation of new data from all these memories, a new form of life is developing. Terminology such as avatars, virtual presence, CAL (Computer Aided Living), etc. are fast becoming part of our normal lexicon.

One of the most enduring tests of when a certain technology has thoroughly disrupted an existing paradigm is that of expectation. An example: if a person is blindfolded and taken to an unknown location, and then put in a dark room and the blindfold removed, what happens? That person will almost immediately start feeling on the wall about 1.5 meters off the floor for a small protrusion, and when finding it will push or flick it, with the complete expectation that light will result. The expectation of electricity, infrastructure, light switches, lamps, etc. has become so ingrained that this action will occur for a person of any language or culture, unless living in one of the very few isolated communities left off the grid.

IoT as the Most Powerful Disruptor

Cellphones, now available to 97% of humanity, along with wireless broadband connectivity (46% of the world has such connectivity today) are two of the most recent major disruptive elements in technology. All businesses have had to adapt, and entirely new processes and economies have resulted. The changes that have resulted from just these two things will pale in comparison to what the IoT ecosystem will cause. There are multiple reasons for this:

  • The passive nature of IoT may be the single largest formative factor in large scale disruption. All previous technologies have required active choice on the part of the user: pick up your phone, type on your computer, turn on your stereo, press a light switch, etc. With IoT just your presence, or the interaction of inanimate objects (such as freight, plants, buildings, etc.) will generate data and create new information objects that can be searched, acted upon, etc.
  • The ubiquitous nature of IoT will be such that virtually every person and thing that exists will interact in some way with at least a small portion of the IoT ecosphere. In a highly connected urban center, the penetration of IoT will be so dense that all activity of people and things will reverberate in the IoT universe as well. To take a quick sample of what will be very likely within one year, in a city such as Johannesburg, Berlin or New York: a density approaching 50 devices per square meter.
  • The almost ‘perfect storm’ of a number of collaborative technologies, including IoT itself, that all build on each other and will exponentially increase the collective capability of each technology individually. The proliferation of low-latency, high bandwidth network fabric; the availability of HPC (High Performance Computing) on a massive and economical scale (as provided by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.); the development of truly spectacular applications in AI, VR, AR; and the diffusion of compute power into the network itself (DCT – Distributed Cloud Technology) all build almost a chain-reaction of performance.
  • Hyperconnectivity – the aspect of massively interconnected data stores, compute farms, sensor fabrics, etc. The re-use of data will explode and will most likely become a commodity – perhaps becoming a new economic entity where large blocks of particular types of data are traded much the same as wheat futures are today on a commodity exchange. An example: a large array of temperature, humidity and soil water tension sensors are installed by a farming collective in order to better manage their irrigation process. That data, as well as being used locally, is uploaded to the farming corporation’s data center to be processed as part of their larger business activity. Very likely, that data, perhaps anonomized to some degree, will be ‘sold’ to any other data consumer that wants weather and soil data for that area. The number of times this data will be repackaged and reused will multiply to the point that it will impossible to track with absolute precision.
  • Adding to the notion of ‘passive engagement’ discussed above is the ingredient of ‘implied consent’ that will add millions of data points every hour to the collective ‘infosphere’ that is abstracted from the actual device layer of IoT. For instance, when you enter your car soon, autonomous or human-driven, the vehicle will automatically connect to the traffic management network in your region. This will not be optional, it will be a requirement just like having a license to drive, or that the car has working safety features such as airbags and brakes. Your location, speed, etc will become part of the collective data fabric of the transport sector. Your electricity usage will be monitored by the smart meter that links your home to the grid, and your consumption, on a moment to moment basis, will be transmitted to the electric utility… and to whomever is buying that data onward from the utility.
  • The privacy and security aspects of this massively shared amount of data have been discussed previously, but should be understood here to add to the disruptive nature of this technology. Whatever fragments of perception of privacy one had to date must be retired along with kerosene lanterns, horse-drawn buggies and steam engines. Perhaps someday we will go to ‘privacy museums’ which will depict situations and tableaus of times past where one could move, speak and interact with no one else knowing…

The Results and Beneficiaries of the IoT Disruption

As with each technological sea change before it, the world will adapt. The earth won’t stop turning on its axis, and the masses won’t storm the castles (well, not unless their tech stops working once they expect it to..). Ten years from now, as we have come to appreciate, expect and benefit from the reduced friction of living in a truly connected and hyperaware universe, we will wonder how we got along in the prehistoric age. Even now, as phone booths have almost completely disappeared from the urban landscape in so many cities, we can hardly imagine life before cellphones.

Yes, the introductory phase, as with many earlier technologies, will be plagued with frustrations, disappointments, failures and other speed bumps on the way to a robust deployment. As this technology, in its largest sense, will have the most profound effect on humanity in general, we must expect a long implementation timeframe. Many moral, ethical, legal and regulatory issues must be confronted, and this always takes much, much longer than the underlying technology itself to resolve. Due to the implications of privacy, data ownership, etc. – on such a massive scale – entirely new constructs of both law and economics will be born.

In terms of economic benefit, the good news is this technology is far too diffuse and varied for any small group of firms to control, patent or otherwise exercise significant ‘walled garden’ control. While there is much posturing right now from large industrial firms that will likely manufacture IoT devices, and the Big Four of IT (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook); none of these will be able to put a wall around IoT. Partially due to the very international manner of IoT, the ubiquity and breadth of sensor/actuator types, and the highly diffuse use and reuse of data IoT will rapidly become a commodity.

We will certainly need standards, regulations and other constructs in order for the myriad of players to effectively communicate and interact without undue friction, but this has been true of railroads, telephones, highways, shipping, etc. for centuries. Therefore the beneficiaries will be spread out massively over time. All humans will benefit in some manner, as will most businesses of almost any type. Ten years on, many small businesses may not ever directly make a specific investment in IoT, but this technology will be embedded in everything they do; from ordering stock, transport, sales, etc.

Like other major innovations before it IoT will ultimately become just part of the fabric of life for humanity. The challenge is right now, during the formative years, to attempt to match the physical technology with concomitant economic, legal and ethical guidelines so that this technology is implemented in the best possible way for all.

 

The final section of this post “A Snapshot of an IoT-connected World in 2021” may be found here.

IoT (Internet of Things): A Short Series of Observations [pt 4]: IoT from the Consumer’s Point of View

May 19, 2016 · by parasam

Functional IoT from the Consumer’s Perspective

The single largest difference between this technology and most others that have come before – along with the requisite hype, news coverage, discussion and confusion – is that almost without exception the user won’t have to do anything to participate in this ‘new world’ of IoT. All previous major technical innovations have required either purchasing a new gadget, or making some active, conscious choice to participate in some way. Examples include getting a smartphone, a computer, a digital camera, a CD player, etc. Even if sometimes the user makes an implicit choice to embrace a new technology (such as a digital camera instead of a film camera) there is still an explicit act of bringing this different thing into their lives.

With IoT, almost every interaction with this ecosystem will be passive – i.e. will not involve conscious choice by the consumer. While the effects and benefits of the IoT technology will directly affect the user, and in many cases will be part of other interactions with the technosphere (home automation, autonomous cars, smartphone apps, etc.) the IoT aspect is in the background. The various sensors, actuators and network intelligence that makes all this work may never directly be part of a user’s awareness. The fabric of one’s daily life simply will become more responsive, more intelligent and more contextually aware.

During the adoption phase, where the intelligence, interaction and accuracy of both sensor, actuator and software interpretation of the data is maturing we can expect hiccups. Some of these will be laughable, some frustrating – and some downright dangerous. Good controls, security and common sense will need to prevail to ensure that this new technology is implemented correctly. Real-time location information can be reassuring to a parent whose young children are walking to school – and yet if that data is not protected or is hacked, can provide information to others that may have far darker intentions in mind. We will collectively experience ‘double-booked’ parking spaces (where smart parking technology gets it wrong sometimes), refrigerators that order vodka instead of milk when the product tracking goes haywire and so on. The challenge will be that the consumer will have far less knowledge, or information, about what went wrong and who to contact to sort it out.

When your weather app is consistently wrong, you can contact the app vendor, or if the data itself is wrong, the app maker can approach the weather data provider service. When a liter of vodka shows up in your shopping delivery instead of a liter of milk, is it the sensor in the fridge, the data transmission, an incorrectly coded tag on the last liter of milk consumed, the backoffice software in the data collection center, the picking algorithm in the online shopping store… the number of possible areas of malfunction are simply enormous in the IoT universe and a considerable effort will be required to ascertain where the root cause of failure is with each error.

A big part of a successful rollout of IoT will be a very sophisticated fault analysis layer that extends across the entire ecosystem. This again is a reason why the network of IoT itself must be so intelligent for things to work correctly. In order for data to be believed by upstream analysis and correctly integrated into a knowledge-based ecosystem, and for correct actions to be taken a high degree of contextual awareness and ‘range of acceptable data/outcomes’ must be built in to the overall network of IoT. When anomalies show up, the fault detection layer must intervene. Over time, the heuristic learning capability of many network elements may be able to actually correct for the bad data but at least data that is suspect must be flagged and not blindly acted upon.

A big deal was recently made over the next incarnation of Siri (Viv) managing to correctly order and deliver a pizza via voice recognition technology and AI (Artificial Intelligence). This type of interaction will fast become the norm in an IoT-enabled universe. Not all of the perceived functionality will be purely IoT – in many cases the data that IoT can provide will supplement other more traditional data inputs (voice, keyboard, thumbpress, fingerswipes, etc.). The combined data, along with a wealth of contextual knowledge (location, time of day, temperature, etc) and sophisticated algorithms, AI computation and the capability of low-latency ultra-high-speed networks and compute nodes will all work together to manifest the desired outcome of an apparently smart surrounding.

The Parallel Universes of IoT Communities

As the IoT technology rolls out during the next few years, different cultures and countries with different priorities and capabilities will implement these devices and networks in various ways. While the sophistication of a hyperfunctional BMW autonomous car driving you to a shop, finding and parking all without any human intervention may be the experience of a user in Munich, a farmer in rural Asia may use a low complexity app on their smartphone to read the data in some small sensors in local wells to determine that heavy metals have not polluted the water. If in fact the water is not up to standards, the app may then (with a very low bandwidth burst of data) inform the regional network that attention is required, and discover where nearby suitable drinking water is available.

Over time, the data collected by individual communities will aggregate and provide a continual improvement of knowledge of environment, migration of humans and animals, overall health patterns and many other data points that today often must be proactively gathered by human volunteers. It will take time, and continual work on data grooming, but the quantity and quality of profoundly useful data will increase many-fold during the next decade.

One area of critical usefulness where IoT, along with AI and considerable cleverness in data mining and analysis, can potentially save many lives and economic costs is in the detection and early reaction to medical pandemics. As we have recently seen with bird flu, Ebola and other diseases, the rapid transportation systems along with delayed incubation times can post a considerable risk for large groups of humanity. Since (in theory) all airline travel, and much train/boat travel is identifiable and trackable, the transmission vectors of potential carriers could be quickly analyzed if localized data in a particular area began to suggest a medical threat. The early signs of trouble are often in areas of low data awareness and generation (bird and chicken deaths in rural areas in Asia for example) – but as IoT brings an improvement in overall contextual awareness of environment initially unrelated occurrences can be monitored.

The importance and viability of the IoT market in developing economies cannot be underestimated: several major firms that specialize in such predictions (Morgan Stanley, Forbes, Gartner, etc.) predict that roughly a third of all sales in the IoT sector will come from emerging economies. The ‘perfect storm’ of relatively low-cost devices, the continual increase in wireless connectivity and the proliferation of relatively inexpensive but powerful compute nodes (smartphones, intelligent network nodes, etc.) can easily be implemented in areas that just five years ago were thought impenetrable by modern technology.

The next section of this post “IoT from the Business Point of View” may be found here.

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