Let’s journal the rollout of IoT

Here, in the first quarter of 2019, we find ourselves at a point that, when viewed in retrospect from a vantage point a decade or two in the future, may be considered supremely important. There’s no way for us to know that with any certainty now. We’ll only be able to discern the significance of this moment in history in several years, after still-to-come developments have unfolded in their entirety.

I’ve lived through several historical turning points in my lifetime so far: Watergate (as a child), the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union (as a student); the return of Hong Kong to a rising China (as a young TV executive living in Hong Kong); the dotcom boom and bust (as an entrepreneur in a spectacular startup venture); the advent of mobile Internet and the Smartphone Decade (again as an entrepreneur).

Each time, I knew that something momentous was happening around me. Every participant did. But each time, I failed to record my thoughts and experiences in a journal. And that failure makes it really hard to go back and reconstruct my contemporaneous worm’s eye perspective of major events.

So this time around, I am trying something different. I plan to write this journal as a way to record my impressions and hunches about the rollout of the Internet of Things AKA the Internet of Everything. This journal will be my contemporaneous chronicle of impressions and milestones, and my take on the situation on the ground as it unfolds. I’ll probably get it wrong sometimes. My views will certainly evolve as I learn more. And by recording my thoughts in public, I may have a way to gather the impressions of readers and experts who can offer constructive input and different perspectives.

Today we stand at the brink of the global rollout of 5G mobile telecommunications. That is, the fifth generation of digital mobile telephony. Just like 4G a decade ago, 5G will advance the mobile internet in ways that are difficult to imagine today.

5G hardly seems like big news. 5G has been widely ballyhooed for more than a year by hype-happy mobile network operators. Some of them jumped the gun. In the past two months 5G had the equivalent of two coming-out parties at the Mobile World Congress and the Consumer Electronics Show. It’s not even here yet, and yet some people are already looking ahead to 6G.

5G is supposed to be the next big thing in telecom and Internet tech. It will offer much faster Internet download speeds (40 times faster than 4G LTE). And much lower latency (which is going to be crucial for augmented reality and mixed reality overlays on real-world settings). And it will require much greater density of cell sites and antennae clusters. For all of the good and bad and everything else that entails.

At this point, we know enough about the rollout of 5G that we can begin to perceive the terminal points of several trends coming into focus, as they converge and intersect and merge in the near distance. This clarity has been a long time coming. More than a decade. That’s what this blog is about.

What will 5G bring us? One way to answer that question is to reconsider the bold claims and marketing vision for the 4G rollout that started about a decade ago. I suspect that 5G will probably deliver on many unfulfilled promises that were made at the dawn of the 4G era.

Specifically, when 4G launched, big claims that were made about the imminent prospect of hyperconnectivity. Everything that can be connected to the network was supposed to be connected by now. As of March 2019, that vision remains largely unfulfilled. Certainly plenty of stuff is connected today, including some things that probably should not be connected, but far more stuff remains stubbornly offline. The network remains somewhat blind and heedless to the existence of this unconnected stuff. I suspect that will probably change in the 5G cycle, as we begin to assign digital identity to every single item, every single location, and every single person on the planet.

While we certainly do have hundreds of millions of computers (clients and servers) online, and several billion smartphones and billions more smart devices such as smart speakers, smart TVs and connected cars, we are nowhere near true hyperconnectivity wherein everything has a web presence or network connection. But today, it’s possible to imagine how the rest of the stuff might eventually be connected or at least detected by the digital network. And that means more things in the real world will eventually be controlled, redistributed and managed by software in the network.

You might say that the advent of 5G, accompanied by a host of other networking technologies, means that we are building out the vast electronic nervous system for the whole planet that was envisioned by Marshall McLuhan 50 years ago and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin before him. If we can imagine that degree of dense global hyperconnectivity, then we can begin to imagine how society and the economy might evolve in some exciting new directions. That’s exactly what this blog will explore in subsequent posts.

One reason we can forecast the trajectory of the hyperconnected world today is that so much of the enabling tech stack already exists. We are just waiting for better connections. This existing technology infrastructure does not just make hyperconnectivity possible, it will also determine which direction it evolves. The infrastructure defines some possibilities and forecloses others; the mere existence of this particular configuration means that some possibilities will be much easier to realize, and therefore more likely in the near term, while other possibilities remain moored in pure potential without an avenue to realization. So the tech stack constricts and propels possibilities down certain channels and in certain directions even as it makes them possible. I’ll try to write about that here, too.

Here’s the tech stack that will enable hyperconnectivity. This stack isn’t quite 100% ready today but it’s coming fast and it is now close enough to describe:

1. Ubiquitous access to high speed, low-latency Internet from fixed or mobile locations;

2. High capacity cloud computing systems that provide the ability for software services to scale fast and ensure uptime;

3. Cheap abundant storage for staggeringly large amounts of data flowing back into the network from networked devices;

4. Artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning to crunch through unstructured big data in an unsupervised way to help us make sense of it and isolate meaningful trends;

5. Robotics and software automation;

6. Smart contracts and blockchains;

7. Augmented Reality or Mixed Reality to see the real-time data overlays on objects and places and people in the real world.

These things have been in the pipeline for quite some time. Amazon made cloud computing available in 2008. Blockchain and cryptocurrency were introduced in 2009. Artificial intelligence existed in theory for dozens of years but only in the past eight years did the GPUs, algorithms and huge data sets for training converge in a way to fulfill the vision. Virtual Reality has existed as at least a concept since 1993. Nick Szabo anticipated smart contracts as early as 1993.

These technologies have existed for several years, but they did not pay off entirely. Yet. Very soon, however, they may once they are integrated. That’s when things will get interesting.

While it is certainly true that each of these technologies has emerged and evolved very rapidly, they never really gelled together into a coherent platform for radical transformation. Instead, during the past ten years, we’ve watched each of these technologies chip away independently at a few ripe industrial sectors, scoring some easy wins and growing steadily more capable, but still a long way away from total sweeping change. What we have today are a suite of not-entirely-integrated technologies that have gone through multiple upgrade cycles. We can say that they are mature now, or close to maturity.

The next stage is to weave them together as features in a unified platform. And that could be a game-changer.

To me, the phrase “Internet of Everything” refers to a system of systems. In order to work as advertised, IoT must incorporate and depend upon this entire stack:

• Hundreds of millions of computers talking to billions of smartphones that are linked to tens of billions of smart devices from cars to door locks to lightbulbs, and all tracked by trillions of sensors in our cars and trucks and drones, roadways, satellites, container ships, warehouses, buildings, sidewalks, parks, civic structures, stadiums, arenas, libraries, school buildings, office parks and even our bodies;
• All of this gear will be connected and mediated in the cloud (whether public cloud or hybrid cloud or multi-cloud or some new edge configuration) and collectively it will provide a platform for the distribution of dynamic and responsive digital services that track our interaction, location, navigation, proximity, and routine patterns as we move through the real world.
• Thereby the network will constantly monitor us and collect really big data about each of us and about the constellation of devices that surround us. Cloud-based services will accumulate datasets so large that they defy human capacity for comprehension; and that’s why we’ll increasingly rely upon cognitive computing and machine intelligence to manage them and make sense of them.
  
  With 4G, we’re close. With 5G, I think this vision will finally happen. With 5G, we’ll see these independent capabilities merge together into an integrated offering. And I expect that we will then see something much greater than the sum of the parts: a foundational platform for major, sweeping change that will redefine the economy and society by 2030.
  
  What might that change look like? In my next post, I’ll review one compelling vision of the near future from a credible futurist.

Next Article in this series: Kevin Kelly’s Mirrorworld is Missing One Key Piece: Digital Identity

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If the topics in this article interest you, then why not join me for a discussion in person? I will be the host and master-of-ceremonies for the Innovation Track of GS1 Connect, the biggest gathering of supply chain experts in the world. This year, GS1 Connect takes place in Denver Colorado on June 19 to 21. You can get early-bird pricing if you apply before April 15.

For 30 years, I’ve been focused on designing and launching new digital services. Today I serve as the Special Advisor for Digital Identity to GS1 USA. GS1 is the global standards body for product identity. `