A thought about the Internet of Things

I was watching a steaming video of a panel discussion from the ITU Telecom 2011 meeting on The Internet of Things. The discussion was based on predictions that there might be as many as 50 billion things connected to the Internet by 2020. That comes to more than six things per person in the world, or more than 24 things for per family assuming the average family size is four persons. And of course the assumption is that the number of things connected to the Internet will continue to climb.

Patrice Lyon in the discussion mentioned that her company is working on the idea of packages of information about things. If your refrigerator is "connected to the Internet" what it means is that there is a portion of the refrigerator that contains (in some subsystem) information (obtained in some way) that can be transmitted via the Internet, and that (some subsystem) can also obtain information (to be used in  some way) from the Internet. If I understood her correctly, the packages of information need not come from the thing itself. Thus the information about your refrigerator might come not only from the refrigerator's connection to the Internet, but also from the stores at which you buy things to be refrigerated, from the dealer from which you bought the refrigerator. Of course one would need giant computing capacity to access the information about a specific thing from all the possible sources of information connected to the Internet, to analyze that data, and to draw conclusions. But there is a lot of computer power in the world today and there should be much more in the future.

I recall that centuries ago someone suggested that eventually there would be one motor in every household. At the time, at the birth of the steam engine, the prediction seemed incredible. So how many motors do you have in your home? How many electric clocks, each with its own motor? How many of your appliances have motors? Are you remembering to count the cooling fans in your computers? There may indeed be many things in your house soon connected to the Internet. More importantly, if you can not easily answer now how many fans you have, how easy will it be to answer how many things you have in your house connected to the Internet? Will they fade into the background of your consciousness? How about in your office?

The participants in the panel discussed "users" of Internet connected devices. I started to wonder who would be the users. In the case of my refrigerator, one might assume that my family and I would be the users, but how about the store from which we will buy the food to replenish the refrigerator? How about the electric company that may wish to reduce the energy use by the refrigerator under certain conditions, say by recognizing that no one was home and reducing the use of heating or air conditioning for the house as a whole, adjusting the energy consumption of the refrigerator according to current outside temperatures and predicted future energy requirements and costs? How about my health care provider, checking to see that my eating habits are healthy?

Now how many of use really understand the electronics in our lives, or the information being transmitted via the Internet? Would you really know if the government called for sensors to be incorporated in all household appliances to monitor people in their vicinity and what they were saying and doing, in order to send the information to the government via the Internet (as the appliances were also sending more legitimate information to other users for other legitimate purposes)? Would you know if sensors were already so incorporated in some of the devices you use?

Now that I have tried to trigger your paranoia, lets worry a little bit about the "users" of the Internet of things.

And remember, you too are a thing. We are already inserting radio frequency identification devices in animals. I can easily imagine our medical systems evolving to a point where every patient would be implanted with devices to monitor health indicators and communicate via the Internet with the doctors, nurses and pharmacist, where everyone would be always identified as a patient.

Orwell was a piker when he thought about big brother watching us!

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