Smart Everything
By Charles Jennings
In 1984, I wrote a small hobbyist-market book for McGraw-Hill titled, simply, Personal Computers. The word “Internet” was not in it once; neither, by the way, was “security.” Today, the Internet envelops us like a great digital fog. It’s everywhere and growing faster than ever.
We’re in the early stages of an Internet of Things revolution (or, as some call it, an Internet of Everything revolution… or a Smart Cities/Smart Government revolution… or a cloud, mobile, big data revolution… or all of the above). What if we all just agreed we’re transitioning into a Smart Everything era? Smart phones, smart cameras, smart sensors, smart data, smart clouds, smart grids, smart appliances, smart roads, smart cars, smart doctors, smart cops, smart cities… smart anything-you-can think-of.
For the term Smart Everything to work, we first need an ironclad definition of “smart.” The Oxford dictionary’s is ideal for all things technological: “A device programmed so as to be capable of some independent action: ‘hi-tech smart weapons’.” But in our Smart Everything model, we must also account for un-programmable humans. Here we need a more qualitative definition, so we turn to Webster’s: “showing intelligence or good judgment.”
Using these two definitions (one quantitative and scientific, the other qualitative and subjective) we can then define Smart Everything as: “A massively connected global network of heterogeneous devices capable of intelligent, independent action, empowering people to use intelligence and good judgment.”
In other words, what if all the myriad “dumb” digital pieces in your life — computer, phone, TV service, company network, social networks, smoke alarms, car keys, Facebook friends, alerting services, etc. — could all be fused and awakened together, suddenly able to interact with you intelligently? (Well, maybe not all Facebook friends.)
And what if, working together, all these elements could produce and deliver all the critical information services you need, and only those services, when you need them most — and do so in a way that actually increased your own personal security and privacy protection? The security challenges in today’s Internet environment make it crucial to deliver on this last value proposition; if we can get the security right, Smart Everything models have a lot to offer and will grow dramatically.
I have witnessed digital revolutions before — several, in fact. They are like great floods, bringing the good in with the bad. But in this case, if enough smart humans build our new Smart Everything systems intelligently (to be agile, social and highly secure), perhaps this next digital flood can be more like a Nile spring than a Japanese tsunami.
That’s the hope. Stay tuned.
