The Internet of Living Things

Makers are moving into the natural world, bringing their digital tools, and asking surprising new questions. What are they looking for?

One of the side effects of Moore’s Law — computing getting smaller, faster, cheaper and more powerful — has been the corresponding rise of a new, technical language. The terms (and especially the buzzwords) seem to be on the same, exponential growth curve.

The naming of tools and trends has become an art form. It’s gone beyond the simple name assignment for a new development, like “PCs” or “the web”, to a predictive forecast of where products should emerge. This preemptive territory marking is best exemplified by the current term du jour, the Internet of Things.

The idea is simple: as computers become smaller and cheaper, they will be embedded into devices and products that interact with each other and their environments. Depending on who you ask or who you credit, the concept dates back several decades. It was almost inevitable that more and more of our everyday life would become connected.

Fast forward to 2015 and the Internet of Things is in full bloom. Because of the stakes — that every device and machine in your life will be upgraded and harvested for data — companies have wasted no time getting in on the action. There are smart thermostats, refrigerators, TVs, cars, and everything else you can imagine.

But there’s another part of the story that goes largely unreported. The same chips, sensors and networks being used to wire up our homes and workplaces are being deployed by scientists (both professional and amateur) to understand our natural world. It’s a new era of connected exploration. It isn’t just a future of efficiency and convenience. It’s also about asking different questions and understanding our world from an entirely new perspective.

In our Internet of Living Things series we’ll be reporting from the front lines of this trend and, with support from Spark.io, inviting you to participate in this process of discovery on OpenExplorer and Medium.

“The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.” –Antoine de Saint-Exupery