your old men shall dream dreams, your young men
shall see visions. – Old Testament, Book of Joel, 2:28.
Dreams have long had a potent grip on the destinies of
people, tribes and cultures. The influence of dreams has had such a determining
factor on the lives of men that over the course of time their occurrence and
interpretation has been given religious significance, with the dreamer said to have
visited the spirit world or been directly touched by the divine (either as blessing
or curse.) The Greeks described three “Oneiroi” bringing dreams to men as
warnings, prophecies or inspirations to follow courses of action desired by the
Gods of Olympus. The Old and New Testaments are replete with divine revelations
sent as visions by God to his chosen prophets. As a startling contrast, the
ancient texts of the Upanishads offer a timelessly sage and insightful
interpretation of the meaning of dreams as the analogue of desires, longings or
fears of the individual dreamer.
The High Technology industry has been built and shaped by
people inspired by very powerful dreams – individuals intrigued by
possibilities, their intellects captured by visions of a better tomorrow. The
preeminent vision in High Tech today, one that is generating churn in the trade
press and starry-eyed speculation among its corporate and individual
participants, is the Internet of Things (IoT) - a mystical concept where all of
human civilization, its endeavors and objects are incorporated into and
controlled thru the World Wide Web.
This is a vast topic to tackle and will be discussed in depth
thru a plethora of blog installments over the rest of the year. Along the way I’ll
dissect both business and technical issues in order to attempt to separate the
wheat from the chaff so as to discern what is or isn’t real and what truly
matters. In this opening article to the series, I’ll provide a framework from
which the IoT will be further explored and analyzed.
Theophany
Imagine a world where every instrument, machine,
appliance and device you own has its own IP address that you can access
remotely. While at work, you use your smartphone, tablet, Google Glass or some
other apparatus not invented yet as a kind of portable ‘personal processor’ to
digitally sign off on a package delivered to your home. At the end of the
workday, you walk up to your car in the parking lot, knowing that your personal
processor will tie into the car’s control network to deactivate the alarm,
unlock the door and engage the ignition sequence when you arrive within 30 feet
of the automobile. Entering ‘Trader Joe’s’ on your processor, the vehicle ties
into the local traffic management grid and chauffeurs you to your favorite
supermarket. You stop for groceries and, consulting your ‘PP’, look over a
shopping list automatically generated by a history of your buying habits
supplemented by a realtime feed from your refrigerator, which keeps a running
inventory stock of your foodstuffs. Your PP functions as a scanner so that as
you pick up grocery items and pass the PP over them, the purchase is wirelessly
communicated to the store and your credit card account is debited. As you
re-enter your vehicle and enter ‘Home’ into the car’s navigation system thru
your PP, you instruct your security system, several lamps, the stereo and oven
to turn on based on the activation of your automatic garage door mechanism,
which opens automatically subject to a protocol established between your PP and
the garage door controller that commences when you are within 90 feet of your
driveway.
Once at home, you empty your groceries into a cooking pan
and put the pan into your pre-heated oven. You insert the oven’s sensor array
into the dish to monitor temperature, humidity, pH and viscosity, with the data
captured and automatically sent to your PP for comparison against parameters
delineated in a stored recipe. Since you have 45 minutes to spare before dinner
is ready (and your PP will turn the oven off automatically should your mix of
ingredients reach cooking completion before that), you change into your
exercise outfit and go for a quick jog around the neighborhood. As part of your
outfit, you carry the PP to automatically control your home security and door
locks, as well as a wearable device that functions as a pulse oximeter,
pedometer & calorie counter. The wearable captures data and wirelessly
sends it to your PP, which in turn collates the telemetry and compares it to a
predetermined training calendar while automatically displaying a GPS map of
your route.
When you return home, you use your PP to turn on your
shower so that it’s pre-heated to a preferred temperature while you are
removing the cooking pan from the oven so the meal cools off a bit. After
showering, you grab your dish, sit in front of the entertainment console, use
your PP to configure it to display a stock ticker RSS feed, skype, your facebook
page, email, twitter page and a cable news program and interact with all of it while
you dine.
All
That Glitters
For some, the above is a wondrous fantasy, a digitized
world of the future that puts anything imagined in Star Trek or The Jetsons to
shame. If one could quantify all of that electronic wizardry in terms of the
equivalent output of human labor, an individual in command of such personal
resources would make the most extravagant Roman Emperor with a
legion of slaves on his family’s latifundia look like a pauper. Indeed, such
capabilities would make someone a quasi-deity of his own personal digital
universe. But how much of this is real or even desirable, and how much is just
a bunch of nonsense that only a Wall Street financier could be dumb enough to
believe in during a pitch by a startup for seed money?
I believe it to be true that Dreams are the
true Interpreters of our Inclinations; but there is Art required to sort and
understand them. - Montaigne
As intriguing as the above scenario may be (especially to
the most avid technophiles), it would be useful to dissect the entire concept
and examine what we discover from the exercise. Starting with the simplest item
first – the activity tracker used in the exercise interval – raises some
immediate questions about such products that are branded as IoT devices. The
wearable instrument’s main purpose is to gather data and wirelessly relay it to
the PP. Stated differently, it’s a set of sensors integrated with some control
logic, a PHY, RF and antenna, with a little bit of RAM sprinkled in. As such,
can this really be considered an important constituent of the IoT, or is it
just an accessory for a segment of smartphone owners?
Let me be blunt: if a storm of similar molded plastic gadgets
and doodads is what evangelists of the IoT are thinking of as the wave of the future,
it’s pretty pathetic. Such devices will also be a dubious proposition as a
business pursuit, since the gross margins on such electronic widgets are liable
to be so awful that they’ll make transistor radios look comparatively lucrative.
Let’s scale the analysis up from the individual to their fully
digital home. If we were to add voice recognition, an advanced AI and an array
of proximity sensors to the mix, the control that person would have over their
environment would be perceived as nearly God-like by their great-grandparents.
But for all of this to work, every item needs to be tied into the control
software of the PP.
There are those who argue that the wireless and wired
infrastructure already exists to support widespread network demand of
this sort. The proliferation of fiber and the steady migration of all wireless
protocols towards coverage under an all-encompassing LTE circus tent suggest
that the capacity for such needs is being anticipated in some circles. The fact
that IPv6 will theoretically support 340 TRILLION individual IP addresses
further bolsters this readiness postulate. But there is one rather major snag
to all this: who, exactly, is going to expend the time, cost and effort to
develop a board with an 8b MCU, timer, memory, random logic, antenna, PHY &
RF and then insert it into a lamp or light switch?
To be fair, not all of the anticipated activities and
functions of the IoT are for trivial things such as controlling light bulbs.
The communication and data chain between the PP and the ‘smart’ refrigerator
during the grocery shopping interval present Big Data opportunities and
challenges. Packaged goods companies are quite naturally salivating at the
prospects of having such intimate access to consumer buying and consumption
patterns & histories, while systems companies and their chip suppliers are
anticipating an explosion of demand for switches, aggregators, routers,
gateways, hubs, storage & data servers and both network & server
virtualization software. To put it another way, there are those who believe the
proclamation that the current internet infrastructure and supported wireless
bandwidth spectrum are already sufficient to handle the IoT is wrong, and that
their own hardware and software businesses will benefit from IoT-instigated
service demands.
Some systems companies are aggressively touting IoT as
the major driving force in their future growth prospects. Ericsson is
forecasting 100B IoT-based processors to ship between 2013 and 2020, while Cisco
touts the IoT market as an aggregate $14.4T opportunity between 2013 and 2022. Though
all of us in the world of High Tech understandably look forward to such excellent
growth possibilities, the financial performance of benchmark networking and
server systems houses suggest that this new industry expansion has not manifested itself up to this point (see
the earlier blog post regarding the “Big Iron” firms - http://vigilfuturi.blogspot.com/2014/08/high-tech-state-of-union-by-numbers-q2.html
.) If and when this anticipated IoT wave does hit, the positive business
effects will spread beyond the systems houses for networking, servers &
storage to backhaul, ISPs, carriers, SaaS companies, the Cloud, database firms
and even eCommerce. One could easily envision an IoT growth spurt lifting the
entire global economy. But the simple truth is we haven’t seen any signs of it –
at least not yet.
A severely negative aspect to all of these IoT-associated
capabilities concerns privacy. Consider the fact that everything in the above
example of a citizen living their life in an IoT world – at work, travelling to
various locations by car, shopping, turning on television channels or lights or
the oven, etc etc…. – is all tagged with an IP address and a time stamp. In
other words, there is a detailed record of everything this person is doing
during the course of a day that is being stored on a server somewhere.
Personally I find this sort of visibility into someone’s life to be a profoundly
repulsive feature of the IoT. Violating individual privacy thru such means
should be controlled thru statutory measures which, if violated, should carry
heinous criminal penalties and require ridiculous hurdles to be overcome before
governmental violations of such digital privacy could be officially permitted.
Finally, there is one thing missing from the current
conception of the IoT – a glaring deficiency that attracts attention to itself
by its very absence: What is the “killer app”? Is there some sort of
combination of hardware and software functionality that could energize the market
in the same way that smartphones and tablets have with mobile computing? The
answer is not a straightforward Yes or No, and there are complexities to the
identification and deployment of such a market-igniting invention. What that
solution might be and what its deployment and utilization issues are is,
however, a topic for a future editorial. ;-)
Special
thanks to Cary Snyder at M.2 Labs for his advice and inputs on this topic.
