Smart Cities — Post Apocalypse and what it means to the IoT(s)
The Pearl Harbor of Internet Attacks happened on the 21st of October, 2016. Does this mean that the internet is as vulnerable as we thought it wouldn't be ?
A cyber attack was launched against the “World Wide Web” nearly a month ago, which crippled most major businesses and cyber companies that handle 90% of everything that we see around us. While we don’t know who is responsible for the attacks and why they are doing it, we can only imagine what an apocalyptic scenario of life without the internet would look like.
Here’s what I picture it to be:
Sitting in your office, listening to your online music collection working on 3 different projects, booking tickets online for a vacation, ordering your groceries. Your life revolves around the internet today. And it suddenly just goes dark.
The screen shuts off, showing you a black mirror. Nothing works. Everything is dead.
Since there is not much work that will happen today, you decide to head home only to be bombarded with the nasty picture of the autonomous vehicles of today stuck at the center of roads everywhere, with the owners trapped inside trying deperately to get out of the car, if not for anything else, just to breathe. So you try to call an Uber, ah well, looks like the site is down, after all it is part of an interconnected network that just went splat. So the oldest trick in the book comes to mind, walk. You walk home, and looking around you notice the lights out, the creepy feeling of darkness, and panic struck humans running around trying to catch food and water instead of “pokemons”. This is not what you imagined when you woke up and had your coffee-maker made perfect blend of coffee whilst you read the newspaper on your iPad which co-incidentally has no news of anything due to the recent events that have taken place. You are now alone. In the wilderness. Scared, dazed and confused.
You now reach home to find it coated in the brightness of the stars and the moon, which is now the only light at the end of the tunnel. The only light shinging on the world as you know it. Resorting to earlier means of communication, only after firing up a ham radio from a century earlier do you realize that things are much worse than you thought. You have been asked to stay calm and well “carry on”.
Days go by very slow, you have no clue on how to go about your life which has just been uprooted. You now decide to stock up just in case. Walking down to the grocery store to do so, you come across dozens of people who had the same thought as you did, somehow calming your mind, you go about your shopping, totalling hundreds of dollars (keeping in mind the amount of savings in your bank). Checking out at the counter, you overhear the manager screaming at the top of his voice — “no cards accepted, cash only”. You panic, your family needs food, you cannot afford it, you have no cash at hand, you decide to shoplift a few essentials knowing that not a lot of people will notice you doing so due to the chaos around. The manager does notice, you get caught, but he cannot call the cops due to the loss of signals in his telephone devices, so you decide to ditch him and make a run for it, and you do, but he is a big tough man and smacks you in the head for trying to escape. Seeing this, the many shoppers in line get agitated and an aura of tension ensues, starting a fight. Just then someone decides to take matters into his own hands and drives a car through the store, waving his concealed weapon stating that what he needs, he takes and anyone getting in his way will endure heavy damage (not the one you can recover from, just saying).
This is the tipping point of the scenario. Chaos ensues. People fight over rice and water. You now belong to the worst day of your life ever, the worst possible event in the history of mankind. You then realize how dependent the human race is on technology and how if given another chance, you would make preparations to tackle this situation if it ever rose again. It is too late now though.
And this is just the beginning. Will this be our future with the “smart revolution”?
The sad reality of this is that this can happen to the world at this moment. Before the Smart Cities totally even come into play.
Can this change ? Maybe, we will just have to go about being smart about it all, won’t we ?
It is still not too late to change, being dependent on technology is a luxury not a way of life. You can still change the way this world works. This situation is only the worst of the worst case scenario’s. It does not have to be. It can be better. It has to be better. It depends on all of us to make sure the balance can be maintained between technology and life.
Reference: This article has been inspired from the link given below, a few ideologies of how things might play out, have been taken from the said article below as well.
