The Internet of (Disharmonious) Things
WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO CREATE A FUTURE WHERE EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED?
By Steve Penhollow
The smart home of the future will communicate with our cars so that it knows to turn up the heat when we’re on our way home. It will be able to differentiate among occupants by their heartbeats. In the smart home of the future, cellphone-sized robots will clean dirt and messes as soon as they appear. Washers and driers tied into solar panels will be able to determine the best times of day to run most efficiently.Refrigerators will maintain an inventory of their contents, monitor expiration dates and suggest recipes. They will also be able to communicate with other appliances in the kitchen. Even toilets will be smart. They will “know” to play your favorite music when you are using them, and they will be able to monitor your waste for health problems.
The World of Tomorrow of Yesterday
Whether or not you can define the phrase “Internet of Things,” chances are you’ve imagined at least one potential aspect of it.
The so-called smart home.
What is the Internet of Things? It’s a sobriquet meant to describe a society where devices routinely communicate with one another and collaborate on tasks.
The smart home, a seemingly sentient dwelling that essentially runs itself, has been a trope of science fiction for decades.
It used to be referred to as the automated home.
Ray Bradbury wrote two dystopian tales about automated homes — There Will Come Soft Rains andThe World the Children Made (aka The Veldt) — both of which were first published in 1950. Dean Koontz penned a novel on the same concept — darker than Bradbury’s dark work — called Demon Seed, which was made into a movie in 1977.
Automated homes and apartments have also been depicted positively (or humorously) in countless films and TV shows, including Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, The Jetsons, Demolition Man, and The Fifth Element.
Happy visions of future homes were once de rigueur at world’s fairs and in industrial and educational films (including Monsanto’s House of the Future and GM’s and Frigidaire’s Design for Dreaming). The appeal of these visions is obvious: We all dream of a home that is even more comfortable and nurturing than the one we currently live in.
The oldest prophecies about smart homes are not all that different from our newest ones. They imagine domiciles that anticipate our needs and almost seem at times to read our thoughts.
Thanks to the Internet of Things, something very much like this could occur sooner rather than later.
Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave
If 2015 doesn’t turn out to be a big year for the Internet of Things (aka IoT), it will definitely turn out to be a big year for announcing things about the Internet of Things.
In a keynote address at the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show (the CES), Samsung CEO Boo-Keun Yoon portrayed a digital Nostradamus. By 2020, Yoon said, every product that Samsung sells will be connected to the Internet of Things.
What is the Internet of Things? It’s a sobriquet meant to describe a society where devices routinely communicate with one another and collaborate on tasks.
At the 2014 IFA consumer electronics show (which happened four months before the 2015 CES),Yoon shared similar sentiments, stating that an imminent smart house would “figure out when you wake up and start the coffee; it’ll prompt you to take your medicine; it’ll turn out the lights when you nod off; it’ll suggest recipes that use up ingredients before they go bad; it’ll give your daughter across the country a virtual place at the dinner table.”
Ben Pring on the IoT: “All we have to do is keep calm and boil the ocean.”
Much of this unprecedented interconnectivity will be achieved via wearables — body-worn digital devices, from flashy computer watches to unseen sensors. A recent Britton blog about wearables discussed this.
“For many, it’s still just a vision,” Yoon said of the IoT. “But change is coming, and coming fast. Remember how quickly — in just a few years — smartphones and tablets have changed our lives. I’m certain the home of the future will be woven into the fabric of our lives just as fast.”
But there are a few barriers to weaving that fabric, and someone else at Samsung shared several of them with the Fast Company website in late 2013. Kevin Lee, director of product strategy at Samsung Design America, pointed out that a coffeemaker designed to communicate with other devices in the house will, by necessity, be a much more complicated contraption than any of the more primitive and inelegant coffee-creation systems.
“If you start loading that thing with connected chips and software,” Lee said, “within a year, I bet you that you need to download new software. Who wants to do that? Who wants to spend another 30 seconds or a minute downloading? And depending on your data plan, you may never get one — and then what do you do? Your coffeemaker is now no longer useful or usable.”
Comically outmoded coffeemakers may not be able to analyze your cerebral cortex or taste buds to determine if you’re craving Kona beans or Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, but they’re cheap, dependable and easy to use.
Cooperation usually occurs only after every avenue for avoiding cooperation has been exhausted.
“That is a new friction that didn’t exist before,” Lee said. “In the old model, the only friction is ‘Where’s my coffee and my filters and my water?’” Battery life is another bummer, Lee said (wearables are energy vampires).
Other hurdles include difficulties in ensuring the security of those connected as well as the present lack of available bandwidth and Wi-Fi across the globe. But the biggest impediment is encapsulated in this line from a Verge website post by Dieter Bohn about IoT rhetoric at the 2015 CES: “If all the smaller guys are making new (and sometimes exciting!) gadgets, the big guys are trying to create the systems that tie them all together.”
Bohn then added, with no apparent irony, “Or, if they can’t dominate the whole ecosystem, they at least want to grab a piece of it.”
If companies focus exclusively on dominating the “whole ecosystem” known as the Internet of Things, then chances are good that there will be no Internet of Things.
My Way or the Highway
As we have seen from various feuds between and among Apple, Microsoft, Google, Adobe and Amazon over the years, the so-called “big guys” are far more interested in bottom lines than big ideas.
They have shown themselves to be about as willing to share technology as wolverines are to share carcasses. Cooperation usually occurs only after every avenue for avoiding cooperation has been exhausted.
After Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered the keynote speech at the 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference, Chris Taylor of Mashable assessed, “Apple is gearing up for an all-out assault on Google, and it needs all the help it can get. According to the battle plan very subtly outlined just under the surface of the keynote, this assault is to be conducted according to the same principle that defeated Microsoft and reversed the position of the two companies: Why try to dominate one platform when you can dominate cross-platform — the territory where Apple does best? What you heard in that keynote were the first shots, softening up the enemy. In stark contrast to the affection of the ‘I’m a PC, I’m a Mac’ –style knock on Windows, you heard Tim Cook describe Android as a ‘toxic hellstew of vulnerabilities.’”
It’s a long way from toxic hellstews to an Internet of Things.
Fast Company asked Lee if Apple and Google would ever willingly cooperate on a standard language of communication that works across connected and wearable devices. “Never,” Lee replied.
Even people who are described as optimistic about the Internet of Things are pragmatic about the long odds.
Writing for Computerworld.com, Mike Elgan pointed out that the Internet was developed at a time when no one was thinking in terms of making money off it.
“This is not the case for the Internet of Things,” he wrote. “The phenomenon is arising in an industrial environment of powerful companies that each want an unlevel playing field in their favor, or that have strong and mutually exclusive ideas about how the industry should work.”
Former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée called it the “basket of remotes” problem, according to Elgan. “If we can’t figure out a simple problem like self-programming TV remotes,” Elgan wrote, “how are we going to build a self-programming, universal and compatible ‘Internet of Things’? If we can’t make one TV remote communicate with three home entertainment devices, how are we going to get 26 billion devices to all talk to and work with each other?”
Steve Halliday, an RFID consultant and entrepreneur, has been quoted as saying that there are currently 400 standards.
There needs to be a single “unifying industry standard,” wrote John Horn on the Recode website. “One or two major companies need to take over and act as the agreed-upon central hub for third-party devices (as Apple is attempting to do), or the industry needs to create a set of standards that everyone can work with,” Horn wrote. “Without standards, the Internet of Things will fail to reach its full potential, and consumers will be left with a bunch of smart devices that are too dumb to communicate.”
Many “little guys” (geniuses, entrepreneurs, academicians and startups) are working on these problems. But, as Elgan asked, are the big guys “going to cede this market to a faceless startup”?
Predictably, Elgan wrote, companies “are coming out with hundreds of Internet of Things devices that are built with proprietary standards, and those companies are asserting that their standards are the ones that other companies should adopt. It seems to me that the so-called ‘Internet of Things’ will be littered with multiple, warring, incompatible standards, protocols and systems for connectivity, making it very unlike the actual Internet and looking more like Gassée’s basket of remotes.”
The difficulties are daunting, to say the least. Even people who are described as optimistic about the Internet of Things are pragmatic about the long odds.
During the keynote address at the 2014 Connected Cloud Summit, futurist Ben Pring offered this deceptively simple recipe for achieving the IoT: “All we have to do is keep calm and boil the ocean.”
He then added, “What we’re trying to do is just so enormous — so complicated — so challenging — that perhaps failure is assured.”
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Steve Penhollow
Freelance Writer/Editor
BMDG
Photos: Shutterstock
