A wired world promises opportunities, limitations and concerns
I'd like to think it's the absent-mindedness of genius, but I suspect it's merely the forgetfulness of encroaching age. Within five to 10 years, however, my problem will be solved. I'll be able to query the net to find my missing clothes, and a lot more. When a billion people are connected to the internet, there will also be 5 billion devices connected, such as blazers and socks, buses and taxis.
Within five to 10 years, we'll see the wiring of the physical world. Up to now, we've had wired machines that build things and need to be automated (with factory automation systems) and, of course, we've started to connect people who need to find and spread information on a extensive scale. But over the next few years we'll start wiring the physical world, so what's capable of being known locally is capable of being known globally. Where is the blazer? Is the door open or shut? How far is the car on the way from Dusseldorf to Sofia? Is it on the right route? (Is it heading for a traffic jam it could avoid by taking another route?) What is the temperature of the swimming pool at the hotel in Sofia?
Everything will be tagged and aware of its own state and location (at least in the developed world). Right now, we do this only in special cases or with expensive or important items, such as train carriages or Federal Express packages. You pay extra for this service, but not a lot extra. It is becoming an accepted business practice.
Is this necessary? In principle, it is not. I should not be leaving my clothes all over the place. The car should be on the proper route. But note that FedEx tags all its packages, even though it never plans to lose any of them.
The information world is a way of dealing with the messiness of the real world. We have wired the people, and we have wired the routine; now we're wiring the non routine. The numbers aren't exact, but I'd estimate that though 99% of Federal's packages take the proper path, more than 80% of its information technology spending is for those that don't.
Wiring devices will give rise to lots of interesting applications, and far more efficient use of resources. It will be possible to know when a bus or train is late or on time, so that mass transit will be more convenient to use. Inventory management will become more and more efficient.
The challenge, or opportunities, for designing software to handle all this will be monumental. We'll need to build ... not intelligence, but self-awareness, into all those devices we're going to wire up. They'll have to communicate: the blazer needs to know the identity of the taxi it was left in; the door needs to know what came through it. (Alternatively, you could query the position of everything; probably both will happen.) Your mailbox, or the drop box into which a delivery service places the goods you ordered online, will know what's inside it.
Obviously, all this has to happen easily. Until now, the task of putting information into systems has had to fight human nature. For one example, I get cards from most of the people I meet, but then it takes superhuman effort for me to collect them - from all the blazer pockets, among other places - and give them to someone in my office to enter into the database.
There's no way I would tell a machine where I am or where I'm going, when I can't even be bothered to fill out my taxi receipts. But fairly soon, it will be easier, because I will simply point my device at a counterpart device, probably using a wireless infrared connection, and the data will be uploaded and entered automatically.
Wired devices will change the way we think about the world. You will no longer need to be somewhere to know what's going on. Even as physical goods become more trackable, pricing will probably become more flexible: just as airline seats vary in price according to time of day and demand, so will access to other goods and facilities. (Of course, most of this will happen invisibly, as people's and companies' agents negotiate with their counterparts.) The world will become virtual rather than fixed.
All this sounds exciting and extremely handy, but there are some downsides, too. If we build up the infrastructure to track things everywhere, it's inevitable that we'll use it for people as well. I find that prospect creepy. I don't know what to do about it, except to point it out, and warn that we should think about it before we go too far. We'll need to build systems to control the spread of data as well as to make it available.
Some day in the future, it will be a pleasure to go somewhere where things aren't tracked, where the doors aren't wired to notice as you leave and enter. People will go to remote places for the sheer pleasure of being unaccounted for. It will feel like taking your shoes off at the beach. Just you and the physical world, with no intervening clothing and no intervening knowledge base.
Are your shoes off or on? Only you know for sure.
Within five to 10 years, we'll see the wiring of the physical world. Up to now, we've had wired machines that build things and need to be automated (with factory automation systems) and, of course, we've started to connect people who need to find and spread information on a extensive scale. But over the next few years we'll start wiring the physical world, so what's capable of being known locally is capable of being known globally. Where is the blazer? Is the door open or shut? How far is the car on the way from Dusseldorf to Sofia? Is it on the right route? (Is it heading for a traffic jam it could avoid by taking another route?) What is the temperature of the swimming pool at the hotel in Sofia?
Everything will be tagged and aware of its own state and location (at least in the developed world). Right now, we do this only in special cases or with expensive or important items, such as train carriages or Federal Express packages. You pay extra for this service, but not a lot extra. It is becoming an accepted business practice.
Is this necessary? In principle, it is not. I should not be leaving my clothes all over the place. The car should be on the proper route. But note that FedEx tags all its packages, even though it never plans to lose any of them.
The information world is a way of dealing with the messiness of the real world. We have wired the people, and we have wired the routine; now we're wiring the non routine. The numbers aren't exact, but I'd estimate that though 99% of Federal's packages take the proper path, more than 80% of its information technology spending is for those that don't.
Wiring devices will give rise to lots of interesting applications, and far more efficient use of resources. It will be possible to know when a bus or train is late or on time, so that mass transit will be more convenient to use. Inventory management will become more and more efficient.
The challenge, or opportunities, for designing software to handle all this will be monumental. We'll need to build ... not intelligence, but self-awareness, into all those devices we're going to wire up. They'll have to communicate: the blazer needs to know the identity of the taxi it was left in; the door needs to know what came through it. (Alternatively, you could query the position of everything; probably both will happen.) Your mailbox, or the drop box into which a delivery service places the goods you ordered online, will know what's inside it.
Obviously, all this has to happen easily. Until now, the task of putting information into systems has had to fight human nature. For one example, I get cards from most of the people I meet, but then it takes superhuman effort for me to collect them - from all the blazer pockets, among other places - and give them to someone in my office to enter into the database.
There's no way I would tell a machine where I am or where I'm going, when I can't even be bothered to fill out my taxi receipts. But fairly soon, it will be easier, because I will simply point my device at a counterpart device, probably using a wireless infrared connection, and the data will be uploaded and entered automatically.
Wired devices will change the way we think about the world. You will no longer need to be somewhere to know what's going on. Even as physical goods become more trackable, pricing will probably become more flexible: just as airline seats vary in price according to time of day and demand, so will access to other goods and facilities. (Of course, most of this will happen invisibly, as people's and companies' agents negotiate with their counterparts.) The world will become virtual rather than fixed.
All this sounds exciting and extremely handy, but there are some downsides, too. If we build up the infrastructure to track things everywhere, it's inevitable that we'll use it for people as well. I find that prospect creepy. I don't know what to do about it, except to point it out, and warn that we should think about it before we go too far. We'll need to build systems to control the spread of data as well as to make it available.
Some day in the future, it will be a pleasure to go somewhere where things aren't tracked, where the doors aren't wired to notice as you leave and enter. People will go to remote places for the sheer pleasure of being unaccounted for. It will feel like taking your shoes off at the beach. Just you and the physical world, with no intervening clothing and no intervening knowledge base.
Are your shoes off or on? Only you know for sure.
